excessive quoting on the list

[Guest guest]

Since a list etiquette thread has recently arisen, I decided to post this

message which I had started some days back.

(BTW - Thanks to members who get the digest form of the list but have

never used a title such as " Digest Number 2900 " which happens on some

lists even though this practice has likely been addressed in the Welcome

message to the list. At least I have never seen such a title on this

list.)

Once again I've had to page through page after page of a message within

the digest of this list where one or two lines have been added to a

message which may well also have been a one or two line message tacked on

to a previous message ad infinitum.

Now, if one gets individual messages from the list, this is not so

noticeable a problem, mainly a waste of bandwidth. But if one gets the

digest form, it is a problem. And, if hearing the clicking of the

keyboard were a problem for me, then I couldn't imagine even being able to

stay on the list. With a recent digest I counted 37 hits of my spacebar

to get to the next message, and then 28 hits of the bar to get to the

next.

I'd urge folks who are not experienced list users or who have never

thought about this issue to have a look at this page:

http://www.gweep.ca/~edmonds/usenet/ml-etiquette.html#SECTION0009000000000000000\

0

or this page http://tidbits.com/article/5386 in the section about " Quote

Sparingly. " The latter includes:

" Quote Sparingly -- One of my peeves with mailing lists is that people

seldom delete unnecessary quoted text in their replies, with the worst

being people who reply to a message in a digest and quote the entire

digest. Quoting sparingly does require manual work, since most email

programs automatically quote the original message in replies. But failing

to edit the original wastes everyone's time and bandwidth. "

--Kathy