Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2003 20:09:53 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Norm Saunders Subject: Proper use of MDOsprey MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear Ospreyers, I notice about once a year or so that I need to remind the members of MDOsprey about generally accepted message quoting ethics. As Bob Ringler mentioned, it has now once again gotten way out of hand. What am I talking about? The tendency of someone sending a one-line reply to a message to quote that entire message (perhaps a hundred lines or more). These thoughtless actions mean that there are even shorter runs of the archives for people to search in. Why? Because I have decided not to pay for any more than 25mb of archival storage. The more junk that fills up the current archives, the more potentially valuable information I need to cut off the other end to keep below the archive limit. Please read the following quote from another list I belong to and take it to heart: > Most email programs these days will automatically quote the > entire original message when the user hits "Reply". This is > intended as an aid in proper quoting; you are *not* supposed > to simply leave the whole thing intact. The idea is that you > quote only a few lines (as few as possible; the old standard > is not more than three lines to a quote) to indicate the point > you're responding to, then add your reply, then quote the next > point, make your reply to that, and so forth. You *delete* all > extraneous text from the reply. > > Unfortunately, a lot of people who are fairly new online have > never learned this, and seem unable or unwilling to pick it up > from context, for whatever reason. (It's not like anyone ever > told *me* how to do it; I simply observed what others were > doing and what made posts more readable vs. what didn't. > Yes, I'm cantankerous; I've been online for 19 years and I'm > *allowed* to be cantankerous.) Anyhow, this lands us with > the teeming hordes who relentlessly quote 15Kb of previous > message in order to add two lines of their own text, include > multiple levels of quoting (almost always a big no-no), > top-post (placing their reply *before* the -- usually unedited > -- quoted material), and commit other such gaffes. On another point, let me remind you again, please sign your postings with your real name, your location, and your e-mail address. Thank you all for taking the time to learn how to use MDOsprey as thoughtfully as possible. Norm ===================== Norm Saunders Colesville, Montgomery County, MD marshhawk@att.net ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================