Why you should quote.

[Phil Boutros]

[Note: This is posted every week or so. If you have seen it already, it's
probably safe to just delete it, unless you still don't know why you should
quote. - Ed.]

[The following was written by allen-1 in response to someone asking why one
should quote in Usenet. - Ed.]

It has to do with the nature of usenet. It's what is known as
"propagation", which I'll attempt to describe.

I dial into IDT's machine and read and write to rmh there. When I
write something on rmh it's immediately written to IDT's machine. IDT
is then responsible for passing it forward to the machines that it
communicates with.

You're dialed into AOL (which has multiple servers). You see what
I've written only AFTER IDT passes it to AOL and AOL puts it into the
queue of messages that it's currently maintaining for rmh.

When you follow up on a post that I've written, your followup is
posted immediately onto AOL's machine, then moved back in the normal
course of events to IDT's machine, where I see your response.

This scenario is of course is very simple, the reality involves
millions of messages and thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of
machines world wide.

A key phrase above is "in the normal course of events". With so many
machines and people involved, things get screwed up sometimes. Even
without any screwups, there's no guarantee that the original post will
arrive at a given server before the response.

So, what often happens is that I'll start seeing RESPONSES to a post
BEFORE I see the original. Then I'm left looking at a single line of
a post, (with no context), that says "I need directions" -- and I'm
kind of left guessing what you need directions to. In the example I'm
referring to, it was pretty clear because of the header.

In other cases, particularly in a more complex thread, the simple
response is often more baffling than instructive. If however, you're
careful to quote enough of the post that you're responding to, then
the person who reads JUST your post has the context available to
understand what you're responding to.

AOL users seem to be more prone to not quoting posts than many other
ISP users -- and this appears to me to be directly related to the fact
that your newsreader provided by AOL doesn't clearly and obviously
supply the quoting function. [ Note: No longer true, since AOL just
doesn't offer newsgroups access at all anymore! - Ed.]

My newsreader is simple -- If I "reply to a post", it automatically
loads the post that I'm replying to into the body of the message that
I'm creating, and then allows me to cut (<snip>) those portions that I
don't want to have included.


Phil
--
AH#61 Wolf#14 BS#89 bus#1 CCB#1 SENS KOTC#4 ph...@philb.ca
http://philb.ca EKIII rides with me: http://eddiekieger.com
v4sw6Chw7ln6pr6OFcr4ma9u7LMw3XGm5l7l7e6t4Rb8en6g4a3Xs7Ip-5.38/-8.77 hackerkey

[Phil Boutros]