I got the following from the Due South news group. I found I was in violation in a couple of areas- line length and posting in html- which I have corrected. It is a good list. Bill Truesdell Bath, ME 1. Put spaces between your comments and quoted text. Please add at least one blank line between your comments and whatever comments you're responding to. I've seen a bunch of postings here recently that have two or three lines of original text nearly buried in 20 lines or so of the original posting. 2. Trim down the original posting so that you include only the part you're responding to. I don't know about other people, but if I see more than one or two screens of quoted text, I don't keep going to find out where the new stuff is. If your newsreader options are set to automatically attach the entire previous posting at the end, please change that setting or trim down the text after it's added. We want to be able to see what *your* comments are! 3. Keep signature files short. About 4-5 lines is the generally accepted length. Longer ones are especially confusing if you only have a couple of lines of actual comments above them. Your comments get outweighed by nonessential text. Again, it makes it harder for us to enjoy your thoughts about DS! 4. Let us know who you are! Some of the no-line-space and big- sig-file problems lately have been exacerbated by people not signing their postings. Putting your name at the bottom of your comments (with, of course, blank lines above and below) provides another visual clue that we've reached the end of your comments and everything afterward is a sig file. 5. Keep each line to 75 characters or less. Although a number of people these days are using Web browsers for Usenet, most of us still use dedicated newsreaders that can't go more than 80 characters wide. So set your window to no more than that and leave a bit of a margin at the righthand side. (FYI, this posting contains lines of about 65 characters in length.) 6. Turn off HTML and MIME encoding. With the increasing use of Web browsers and Outlook Express on Usenet, some of you are generating messages that to the vast majority of us, look like random letters buried in a mass of garbage characters. I've heard from users of both those types of programs that this encoding can be turned off, so please make sure it is.