> Having said all that, if I had one wish for a change to BEE-L, [it would 
> be] about the rule against "excessive" quotes. <snip> the problem for me 
> is that some participants at BEE-L feel that they must comply with the 
> rule so strictly that they slash out _all_ the context, making their reply 
> very difficult for the rest of us to understand and to place back into the 
> proper order. Since some people respond to posts made days ago, saving the 
> messages or even using the web feed is not a guaranteed solution.

You raise a very good point, and one that has been debated recently.  I 
happen to agree with you, to a certain extent.

Actually, the rule against excessive quotes is not to save space so much as 
to simply to make the archives more easily readable.  People do read the 
archives, and when searching, quotes that are not relevant to the article in 
which they occur cause multiple false hits and can cause people to give up 
searching and just ask the same question again on the list, when many good 
answers are already in the archives.  People who search before they ask, ask 
better questions and are more "informed".

Personally, I try to pare down the quotes as much as possible, as above, but 
leave the nut of the points I am addressing, rather than writing them all 
out again.

I also make sure that I use the proper quote format, *with carats*.  Carats 
make the quotes obvious.  For some reason, possibly because they cannot 
master their email software, or are using HTML as default, some writers do 
not respect this convention, and IMO this makes their posts difficult to 
read since they usually do not mark the end of quoted blocks.  It would be 
really nice if all would respect the conventions.

allen
http://www.honeybeeworld.com/diary/
---
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by 
one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
 --  Edmund Burke

 

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