> 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
*******************************************************
* Search the BEE-L archives at: *
* http://listserv.albany.edu:8080/cgi-bin/wa?S1=bee-l *
*******************************************************
|