SR - Arrow vote rationalization

[Timothy A. McDaniel]

I have a plea to those on the list.

                         PLEASE TRIM QUOTES!

Too many people are just replying with a few lines and then appending
the ENTIRE message they're replying to, complete to signatures and the
standard Ansteorran mailing list maintenance block.

Then someone ELSE replies to that, adding only a few lines, and
quoting the other message in toto, so we see it all again.

Then someone else replies.  In full.

All for messages that we can usually remember, and where the replies
address at most one point of the previous message -- so if the rest is
deleted your message gets thru just as well.

We certainly don't need 4 copies of how to do Ansteorran Mailing List
tasks, with the 7th repetition of Gilli's message, the third for
Lyonel's rebuttal, or the 11th copy of the OUMB query (in HTML, yet).

(Worse are replies that should have gone privately to the original
author.  OK, you're grateful; it's OK to just tell them privately, and
not add Yet Another Message to the list.)

Unneeded quotation is clutter -- it distracts from your point.  To be
conscientious and complete, I ought to page down in such cascade
messages just in case someone put some reply in the middle.  I don't
bother any more.  If I see a page of mostly quote (usually
badly-formatted, too), I skip to the next message, and farewell your
deathless prose, farewell all your effort to communicate.

Also, some of us have slow links to the Internet.  Some of us pay for
disk space or transfer time.  Some of us have limited disk space and
want to do long-term storage of some messages.

When Voltaire wrote a 16-page letter to Benjamin Franklin, the
recipient didn't write "lol rotflmao ben" at the top and mail it back.
None of us is Voltaire or Franklin, but even we latter-day slack-jawed
yokels can aspire to be more like our noble ancestors.

Daniel de Lincolia
-- 
Tim McDaniel.   Reply to tmcd at crl.com;
    if that fail, tmcd at austin.ibm.com is my work account.
[To repel one common flame: "if that fail" is what grammarians call
"the subjunctive mood".  It's not a typo; it's just a bit archaic.]
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