RE: RE RE RE RE RE RE R E [Mod]

[Guest guest]

As Oliver said, the endless discussion of such practices is as annoying,

and wastes as much bandwidth, as the practice which is being questioned.

 

The list policy is that you should trim your messages, the rules and

guidelines state:

 

>4/ Quote selectively.

>

>When replying to a post think before including the original message

>verbatim. There are two main ways of replying, keeping the original

>message at the bottom or breaking the original message into blocks and

>putting your own responses underneath each of these blocks. If you use

>the former method then only include the original message and edit out any

>messages to which it may have itself been a response. If using the latter

>then keep the blocks short, and only retain those which are relevant to

>your reply.

>

>Messages which including too many quoted messages are often difficult to

>read, especially for those receiving the digest form of the list, and can

>get quite large which takes longer to download and may work out expensive

>for those who pay for internet connection time.

 

I think this accurately and fairly sums up the position, the reason for it,

and provides a balance between keeping messages to a reasonable size while

retaining the context of a discussion. Any suggestions as to improvements

will be welcomed.

 

As far as using the reply markers of '>' is concerned, this is considered a

perfectly reasonable way of indicating quoted material. Some mail programs

will use this to use different styles (colours, fonts, emphases) to mark

out quoted material separately from the new content. It is also a well

understood standard and ensures there is no confusion in determining the

difference between quoted material and new content. You can of course

quote in a different way if you prefer, though the onus is then on you to

ensure you are correctly understood.

 

On a side note here, if you need to copy your emails into another programme

to be able to edit them I suggest you should find a better mail

client. All good mail programs (and even bad ones) should allow for search

and replace at the very least. A really good email program will also trim

any signatures, but these seem to be few and far between.

 

As a further incidental note, you should start you signature by placing two

dashes then a space on the first line (with you signature itself beginning

on the second) to indicate this.

 

Attachments - there is no list policy on attachments as such, but they are

allowed up to the point that this option is not abused, at which time there

will be a discussion of how the rules should be formulated. Sending small

pictures, for example, have in the past been beneficial to more members

then an hindrance (no one has ever complained about receiving

attachments). It should be said though that if I were to disallow

attachments this would not affect the receiving of messages sent with HTML

as containing an attachment, this is caused by a mail client decoding the

message in that way.

 

Finally the subject of HTML emails, this seems to be a point of contention

in all mailing list and newsgroups at some point, and more wasted bandwidth

is generally used in discussing this practice than is wasted in the HTML

content. Some feel there is no need for HTML in email, personally I would

disagree with that position. In writing a document people use indentation,

bullets, different sorts of emphases, and colour in order to better and

more clearly get their message across. Email was a plain text medium for

technical reasons, originally it also lacked supported for non-English

characters (you couldn't even write 'naive' correctly) but few argue about

the use of different encodings to allow character sets other than ASCII to

be used. You cannot argue from what email was as to what it should be, it

evolves with technological growth in much the same way as anything

else. Naturally there needs to be a balance, background images for example

are certainly a waste of bandwidth. As I say this is my personal feeling,

but because of 's desire to provide top quality advertising there is

no way this can be turned off. I can manually warn people not to use it

but as it has never been an issue I see no reason why it should be made one

now.

 

I hope that outlines the current situation regarding the list, though I

must admit I don't see where the problem was that prompted Rowan to

comment. I thought people had been rather diligent on this point recently,

though a reminder always helps. If anyone wishes the rules on a particular

matter to be changed then you will need to get the support of a significant

number of the active members of the list. Please mark any such discussion

by adding " [Rules] " to the subject line.

 

Likewise any continued discussion of this topic should include " [OT] " in

the subject line to indicate it is an off topic posting. Some people

choose to only read messages which relate to veganism (presumably this

would include the Vegan Society, I know it has been a problem in the past

for Vanessa) and reading through messages of no relevance is as offensive

to them as the practices being discussed are to those involved.

 

Michael

List owner