[at-l] quotes and flames

[wb4pan@mindspring.com (Chase Davidson)]

Yo Gang,

	Seems to me!   With Email it is often  and its very easy to
misunderstand the authors intention. While following threads (Do most
people thread there mail? Does everyone know what that means?), I see
that often a reply is interpreted as a direct smear to the original
poster (by the original or previous poster) when it is preceded by
quoted material. When this was often not the replies intention.
	Perhaps often it would be better to write your reply in a complete
sentence's or rather with a complete thought or stand alone paragraph
that does not always rely on the quoted material. Rather than put your
message at the bottom of a lot of quoted material in an in complete
sentence. Examples:
===================================================================
1st message
===================================================================

J. Smith says

       It is very evident that elephants appear blue due to the blue
light filtered from the sky here in Oregon. blah blah blah
j

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=================================================================
2nd message or a reply
=================================================================

J. Doah replies

>>J. Smith says

>       It is very evident that elephants appear blue due to the blue 
>	light filtered from the sky here in Oregan. blah blah

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	It is the soil.

Jdoah

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========================================================================
 3rd message.  A better reply might be formatted in this way;
=======================================================================

abc replies;

	Elephants in Oregon are blue because the plants they eat are affected
by the contents of the soil. 
The soil contents are transferred to the elephant when the elephant eats
the plants.
abc

>>J. Smith says

>       It is very evident that elephants arew blue due to the blue 
>	light filtered from the sky here in Oregan. blah blah

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===========================================================================

	Ok so they are silly examples but I too have trouble getting my
thoughts into type written messages. When an author asks specific
questions it is often easy to type your replies in between the authors
questions. This saves time if you are slow at typing. And that seems ok
to me after all the idea here is to share information.
	When I see a bunch of quoted material at the top of a message it makes
me wonder if the replier is going to have an original thought or just
wants to flame the author. 
	YOu should in most instances type your reply in complete thoughts and
put your message above the quoted material. If the reader is still
cannot follow your thought then he can scroll to the bottom and read the
quoted material. Most mailers can be set to automatically put the quoted
stuff at the bottom. This is required on some listservers. I see many
but not all aol users have the quoted material at the top. Perhaps it is
difficult to set this function with aol software.
	With Netscape messages are threaded with click of a button. They can be
threaded so that all messages from each sender are grouped together i.e.
all messages from abc@aol are together. More ideally for list type mail
is the "thread subjects feature". All replies for each subject are
grouped together. This makes it easy to read all the replies on say
"Leki Poles" in the order that they are received before going on to the
next subject. 
	I expect most listers use this "thread subject feature" of there
mailer. Using this feature makes it seem silly to have the quoted
material on top where it has to be either reread or skipped over again
and again for each message. I bet those folks on digest get there fill
of quoted material here on ATL. I receive PCTL in digest form and most
of the folks their are good about putting there thoughts at the top. 
	Ok while I continue these worthless silly thoughts another feature I
enjoy with email is "filters". I expect all but the simplest mail
programs have this feature. Filters automatically sort my email into
separate folders. All AT-L stuff goes into eh atl folder, PCT in PCT
etc. This makes it easy to find my personal mail and keep it separate
from list stuff. If I do not have time to read list mail I can at least
check for personal mail. Filters could be used to automatically delete
topics with certain subjects. Since it is rare for us to actually follow
a subject line. This is not recommended, you could miss some valuable
information haha. 
	Again perhaps the reason our content doesn't follow the subject is that
it is just so easy to hit reply and then type something irrelevant to
the original post. Why not change the subject line or just create a new
thread, you can do that you know. If you reply to an email with an
incorrect subject feel free to change the subject to something
appropriate.
	I have been on a number of listservers long before AT-L came along.
Most are very strict on following rules of format such as these and have
very narrow acceptable subject lines. We are fortunate here at this
campfire circle not to have these restrictions. Still I think some loose
guidelines are appropriate and add a bit of professionalism too.

Ya I have too much time on my hands. Stuck home on a long weekend. Now
let me read this one more time and see if I really want to send it. You
are probably happy to hear I often just delete it after i write it :-)

Thought for the day "Never relay on a computor to your spelling"

chase