[SC-Help] Re: Ping Mike Easter

[Garen Erdoisa]

antioch wrote:
> Hello Mike
> Great news - my ISP is at last filtering out those .gif spam emails.
> [snip]
> P.S.
> For the record - I do not agree with your comments on msnewsreader groups 

Just a comment: There are very good reasons for using the recommended 
newsgroup quoting style. It has to do with making it easy for others to 
understand what you are talking about when you post a reply to anything 
by placing your comments into context.

1) If you do not quote at all in a reply you leave the reader guessing 
at what you are replying to.

2) If you quote the entire message but then post your reply above or 
below the the message you are responding to, and the message happens to 
be very long and cover a lot of topics of discussion, again you leave 
the reader guessing as to what part of the message your reply was for. 
This is why you should put your replies into context.

4) Newsgroup quoting styles have been in use now for well over 20 years, 
they are very well understood and accepted quoting practices among those 
who participate in newsgroup threaded discussions. Because of that, if 
you choose for whatever reason to not follow these accepted practices, 
then you invite criticism. Quite often people who fail to follow 
accepted practices in threaded discussions and choose to ignore request 
to start doing so, will eventually be ignored completely and/or not 
taken seriously.

5) It's bad form to quote the entire message of an OP (Original Poster) 
especially so if that message is more than just a few lines in length, 
unless you are doing a point by point response to the message and 
properly contextualizing your responses as you go. You should [snip] any 
comments you are not responding to.

A lot of these styles are just adapted for computer use from accepted 
academic and/or journalistic quoting and referencing styles that predate 
computers by centuries.

I'm making these comments partly to let you know that Mike Easter is 
correct and is far from being alone in his thinking on these issues.

Mike Easter is just more vocal than most about pointing out bad posting 
styles. Most people who don't like such bad form would just put your 
posts into a kill file and be done with it, or be annoyed at it but say 
nothing. That is usually what I do.

--
Garen