Hi again,
It's time for another trimming missive from your grumpy
neighborhood list chaperone. Which would be me.
So:
When you respond to a post, TRIM AS MUCH QUOTED MATERIAL AS
POSSIBLE! Or you may one day find your participation in the list to
be more difficult.
No, I'm not going to go around penalty-boxing or unsubscribing
people. What I do have in my possession, however, is a procmail
recipe that, properly adapted, will be able to detect most excessive
quoters. Whether I have it flag the messages for review, auto-reject
them, or simply toss them into the bit-bucket... well, that's a
matter for another day. I am not putting this recipe into place yet.
I still have this vague, idealistic hope that people can actually
learn to respect the community and its members, and act accordingly.
What do I mean by that? Excessive quoting makes digests harder to
read and more frequent, both of which make them less useful. There
are well over a thousand list members subscribed to the digests.
Every time you quote more than is needed, you're putting your
convenience above the convenience of those thousand-plus other people.
(Similarly, every time someone posts with "I know this is
off-topic, but..." you can finish that phrase with "...I figured I'm
so important that it's okay for me to ignore community policies and
clutter the inboxes of almost seven thousand other people".[1] But
that too is a topic for another day.)
Some may assume I'm singling out top-posters. True, I find
top-posting to be only slightly less annoying than a sandpaper
massage, and top-posters are far and away the worst abusers when it
comes to excessive quoting. Nevertheless, they are NOT the only
ones. In fact, it's more annoying to see three screens of quoted
text and then two lines of new content than the other way around.
This, however, does NOT excuse top-posting. What it means is that
excessive quoting is excessive quoting, and that's bad no matter what
direction you think time flows.
So stop it, please. I've only been asking for four years now, and
a similar exhortation has been in the list policies
(http://css-discuss.org/policies.html) for as long. I don't think
it's all that much to ask.
As always, if you have questions or comments about what I have to
say, please reply to this message off-list. If enough people say or
ask the same thing, I'll post a summary and response to the list.
Otherwise, let's not add to the list clutter.
Thank you.
--
Eric A. Meyer (http://meyerweb.com/eric/), List Chaperone
"CSS is much too interesting and elegant to be not taken seriously."
-- Martina Kosloff (http://mako4css.com/)
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