>
..............What really gets my goat is
other people making up arbitrary rules about what an ideal post looks
like.
>

There was some merit in the original complaint - but it risks being dumbly
arrogant to use the terms dumb & arrogant :-). More importantly, it almost
ensures that the recipient will be so annoyed that the intended (quite
valuable) message will be lost. Try & note the valulable points in the
message while ignoring the abuse.

What the complainant was intending to communicate was

-  if responses follow what is being responded to then most people find it
easier to follow (and I agree in most cases) and

- minimising information free content is liable to make the list a nicer
place for all.

I agree that consciously trimming out extraneous material is meritorious. I
sometimes leave much of a prior post in place but if I do it is (almost
always) because I think it adds to the overall information content. I note
(not just on this list) that some people often make little or no effort to
trim posts they are responding to.

The comment on the multiple footers is worth noting. Unlike junk DNA (which
they vaguely resemble) they really do seem to have no functionality and
added, in this case, about 1 MB to the bandwidth of the net. If we could
trim this much bandwidth from the average PIClist message we would deload
the MITS server by about 50 gigabyte per year. The net has broad shoulders
but if everyone treated it as a finite resource (little hope :-( ) it would
work more nicely for all of us. There are in fact etiquette rules, some
unspoken and some embalmed in the PICList faq, which suggest or demand the
minimisation of bandwidth. Some poor souls (hopefully a diminishing
percentage) have low bandwidth lines and/or dial up connections and such
suffer disproportionately from largely regurgitated content.

Such unfortunates may now curse me (gently please) for the low information
content of this post.



            Russell McMahon

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