Re: move to usenet?

On Wednesday 20 Aug 2003 22:58 in <3F43EEEB(dot)5010304(at)fireserve(dot)net>, Dennis
Gearon (gearond(at)fireserve(dot)net) wrote:

> I prefer NOT to have to scroll down to the bottom of an email anyway. I
> think discussion list emails like ours need to be like your medical
> records, the most important, recent stuff is at the top.

This approach puts answers out of the context of their related questions.

Virtually all Usenet newsgroups and private mailing lists are Q&A style
technical support forums. They are not at all like medical records, which
are mostly logs of empirical data. Consequently, the "medical records"
analogy is really a poor one for a context like the one in which this
meta-discussion is occurring.

Instead, the person replying to a message should trim that message down to
the specific parts to which the follow-up will pertain, and then place each
answer immediately after the question or observation to which it is
replying.

This has been the Usenet convention for over 15 years [and a Fidonet
convention even before that].

> I'm not exactly sure what full quoting is.

Full-quoting is the retention of those parts of a message to which the
follow-up message is not replying. See my follow-up to David Olbersen's
message for an explanation of why this is poor practice.
--
Regards,

Dave [RLU#314465]
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dwnoon(at)spamtrap(dot)ntlworld(dot)com (David W Noon)
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