repeating portions of earlier messages

[Mark A. Mandel]

Ron wrote:
>>>>
Yes. I don't quite see the problem with repeating the messages, as long as
the new comments are at the TOP and I don't have to scroll to the bottom to
find out what the new comment is.
<<<<

"Scroll to the bottom" implies that you receive and read each message
individually. I have found it difficult to deal with the continual
interruptions to my workday and subscribe with the digest option, receiving
24 hours' worth of posts each day just after midnight. I have to scroll
down, down, and down further, watching for the end of the "> > > >" (and so
on in varying lengths) at the left margin, with special attention required
if I want to read the contributions of those who insert a line or two of
their own comment here and there amid 400 lines of multi-generation quote.

I am not the only person in the world who finds top-quoting difficult to
read; see below.

In my own posts, I try to
 - quote enough to provide context, but no more
 - arrange multiple generations of quotes, if any, in threaded order
 - and attribute all quotes to their originators.

This takes a bit of time and effort, of course, but I consider it
worthwhile, making my posts (I hope) easier and clearer to read, and doing
unto my fellow listies as I would like them to do unto me.

mark by hand

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http://lists.netisland.net/archives/plug/plug-2004-06/msg00119.html

You've misread my purpose. The reason I harp on this is that
top-replies are qualitatively less useful for the community.

I've watched quite a few email conversations go horribly askew,
including people requesting information that was already presented
in the reply trail, because there was too much useless information
there. I've also, far too often, gone through the experience of
asking someone a series of questions and getting a top-replied
"Yes" back (or something similar). These are infuriating problems
that are a direct result of top-replies.

You'll note that I did also respond to the question at hand at the
time. I included the top-reply complaint because answering that
simple question had required me to go through the top-reply
spaghetti to figure out what was going wrong. *Especially* in the
case that you're asking for help from technically skilled Unix-y
people, top-replies are a Bad Idea.

> As a courtesy to others I will cut off non-relevant portions of the
> message below the top quote.  Answers to ordered lists will be responded
> to in-line with a note at the top of the message signifying this.

I think that's a reasonable approach, but I think it's more work for
you than just replying infix the way traditional MUAs (that is,
pre-Outlook) default to doing (and the way I am here).

(I note that you didn't actually trim the useless quoting from the
message I'm replying to here.)

[...]

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http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/brox.html

What is the reason to quote at all? Consider it. It shouldn't be to allow
people to scroll down to see all earlier discussions. If the news client is
a bit smart, fetching the older articles from the server should be just as
easy as to "scroll down". If a thread goes forth and back some times and
earlier quotes accumulate, an article including all those quotes might get
five-ten times larger than a posting without quotes, this wastes bandwidth
and hard disk space. Therefore, IMHO, no quotes are far better than a
posting at the top of all old quotes.

Ot the other hand, it's very easy to lose the context in a posting without
any quoting at all. Letting the reader understand the context is very
important for easy reading. Therefore there should always be some few lines
reminding the reader about what kind of discussion he is into.

If a person has to scroll down to read the new information, there are
probably too much quotes in the article. A person that is good to use quotes
never quotes more than some few lines at once. If I can't find the right
lines to quote, I often replace all the quotes with a short summary of the
discussion so far. Actually I can agree that it is more annoying when
complete articles are quoted with a small "yes" or "no" at the bottom than
to read a top-post.

There is also another very important aspect with quoting that shouldn't be
underestimated; the quotes should tell what parts of an article you're
replying to. Often you have some viewpoints about some parts of an article,
and other viewpoints about other parts of it. The best way to solve that is
to quote a little bit, come with some comments, quote some more, and then
write some comments to that as well. This can't at all be done in a
top-posting.

[...]