Posting etiquette

[Damien Hall]

Could I please, fervently, renew my plea for people to make their posts clear?
I've posted about this before, making two specific requests:

1.  Please would EVERYONE ALWAYS sign ALL their posts?
2.  Please would people mention the subject of their post in the body of the
post, ie not just in the subject-line of the e-mail?

What was a minor niggle is becoming a bit more of an annoyance, due to the fact
that if you receive the digest version of this list, the individual posts don't
have their subject-lines or their senders at the top of them.  I think this is
a fascinating and extremely useful list but the problem with people not
identifying themselves or their subjects was emphasised this week when I made a
cut-and-paste compilation of the thread on the origin of 'gay' for 'homosexual'
and the associated lisp stereotype, to send to a friend not on this list.  I
had to apologise to him for not being able to attribute about half of the posts
to anyone.  In some cases I was personally able to guess who the sender might
have been but didn't want to reify my guesses in an off-list e-mail, so I just
apologised.  He said that the compilation was very useful and interesting to
him, but I think it would have been even better had I been able to identify all
the posters and so follow people's individual threads.

I would like to ask everyone, whatever their subject is, and even if they post
every single day, if they would please always sign their posts.  I'm aware that
most people on this list are probably able to identify the frequent posters
with alomst complete accuracy, but unsigned posts greatly reduce the outside
utility of the list, I think, and, even for those of us on the list, it would
be nice never to have to guess who had said what.

Many thanks.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania