administrivia: etiquette note on how to reply

[Richard Welty <rwelty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

as i prepare to head for sunny florida for the next week or so, i thought
i'd send a note on an etiquette topic. i'm not aiming this at anyone in
particular, or at any current controversies.

the first comment is that people formulating replies should make every
effort to trim the text they are replying to down to the amount necessary
to provide context.

the second comment has to do with a practice known as "top posting".

long standing network tradition has it that when replying, the text you are
replying to should be indented (usually with "> " at the start of each line
of text from the original message), and with an attribution at the top of
the indented original text.

moreover, you should then interleave your reply with the original note.
what you should _avoid_ doing is placing your entire reply before the
original note (that is, "top posting"). unfortunately, M$ outlook has
become the dominant mail client, top posting has become the norm.

i do think that top posting has caused a lot of the problems with failure
to trim the old messages to their minimum, as folks reply without
really even looking at what they are replying to -- it's off the bottom of
the screen, out of sight and out of mind.

this, i'd encourage everyone who formulates a reply to consider these
things when doing so. i'd also encourage them to cut-and-paste the subject
line for the specific posting within the digest on to their reply. this is
something that is often overlooked, and leads to confusing threading
(although it's not so bad as it used to be.)

richard
- --
Richard Welty                                         rwelty@domain.elided
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
              Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security

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