Re: Netiquette

On Thursday, June 20, 2002, at 09:15 AM, Analysis & Solutions wrote:

people quote way too much. does anyone actually read the quotes? i don't want to reread something i already read. just get to the point. if someone contradicts themselves then quote them.

Then get rid of it! People who leave excessive quotes demonstrate how lazy they are and their lack of consideration about the bandwith and storage space of the entire net and people that use it.

I was going to stay out of the thread, because people have ways of doing it that they are set in, but this is really the crux of it -- allow me to extrapolate on what Dan said. Please realize that these aren't "fire and forget" emails. They are stored, mirrored, archived. Somewhere, some site (such as theaimsgroup.com) is volunteering their resources to make sure that this information isn't all lost. But if people quote the entire email because they're too lazy to snip, then that's a lot of unnecessary extra data which has to be stored with it. If it's relevant to this particular atomic post, include needed quoted data. It will help bring context to the conversation, for newcomers or people like me who are subscribed to too many lists to keep track of threads in our heads. But don't just include the whole email and post at the top of it, unless it's really short. These huge threads get longer and longer with each iteration of the conversation, like a memory leak. There's not built-in garbage collector for a mailing list, so it's up to subscribers to keep the noise down. Some people, especially in business, like to slap their comments on top of a previous email. This helps in certain situations where there is no centralized mailing list, and isn't really that big a deal since it's not being sent out to thousands of people or publicly archived. In fact, it's probably recommended. But for mailing lists, really, just quote what you need. Some good mail clients will let you do this very easily, by selecting whatever text you feel is appropriate and then hitting "Reply" and only that text is included as quoted material in the reply. You can further snip this down, as you should, in consideration of others. As a subscriber to a mailing list, you do have a responsibility to keep that mailing list from becoming overcongested. It's like not throwing a paper cup or trash out the window when you're driving down the highway. What happens when someone needs to go to extra trouble to maintain the roads? The taxes go up and tolls are charged. If you want to pay for the privilege of using this resource (either via subscription fees or via advertising, such as is found in Yahoo! groups mailing lists or SourceForge lists), then go ahead and waste the bandwidth with pages of extra, unneeded, information. Erik ---- Erik Price Web Developer Temp Media Lab, H.H. Brown pricee@hhbrown.com