[AC-Admins] Quoting style for mailing lists, newsgroups, and forums

[Pippin Bear]

On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 09:33:05PM -0400, Solei wrote:
> But the "signal in the noise" is always on the top of the e-mail 
> message, so it's not like you're searching through everything to find 
> the new text. Looking through the archives, that tends to be the case.

But if you're not expecting me to look at anything other than the top
of the message, why include a whole copy of the previous message below?
It's a pure waste of bandwidth and disk space (and multiple taps of the
space bar to page through it) if there's no reason for it...

...unless you're expecting me to look at it.  If you're expecting me to
look at it to be reminded what's gone before, it too long and full of
clutter to be useful; if you're including it so that I have a copy of the
previous message, please don't; I keep all my mail for an insanely long
time anyway and it just means I have far more copies of each message than
I need to store.  Even given the tiny cost of disk space and bandwidth,
it's still a needless waste if it achieves nothing.

I have also, in the past, sometimes read only the top-posted part of a
top-posted reply, only to discover later than I missed something important
because the writer had *also* gone and typed some responses interspersed
in the previous message.  Those additions were *very* hard to spot even
when I realised they were there because the original message had not been
">" quoted, and the writer had not even bothered to start a new line,
let alone surround their text with blank lines, and I could only detect
their changes by flipping back and forth between the new message and
the previous one and eyeballing the changes.  Talk about tedious!

But that is the reason I can no longer optimise by ignoring the original
message in a top-posted reply - some people are stupid and expect me
to find extra hidden bits in there.  It was never too easy to ignore
anyway; I'd often start reading the message, find I didn't know what
they were talking about, scroll down, find some context, scroll back
up and finally be able to read the original.  Sometimes I'd have to do
this several times to get enough context, effectively having to read
backwards in chunks through the message.  "Proper" nettiquette-compliant
quoting is far *far* *FAR* easier to read.  Is it really all that weird
to ask that the text in a message be in chronological order, and quoted
to indicate how many messages back it was originally written?

Also, please remember that mailing-list mails are written by only one
person but read by (in this case) 10 or so people, so if you can make
your email quicker to read and understand, it's worth doing even if it
takes up to 10 times the individual saving to do so.  Tit-for-tat game
theory suggests you'll benefit because others will do the same for you.
(Please.)

Sorry to rant.  I just don't see how anyone can possibly think Outlook
Express-style top-posting is in any way superior to the traditional
style of quoting.  The only possible advantage I see is that it's the way
Outlook Express lays out a reply by default... and therefore Microsoft
is probably ultimately responsible for making many billions of emails
harder to read than they should be.  What a *****ing waste of time.

Pippin