This used to posted frequently on comp.lang.per.misc for obvious reasons -

The following message will be posted periodically until observed clue-levels in these parts improve, or until the heat death of the Universe arrives.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: To send better messages, please trim and summarize what you're replying to, and integrate your quoted text with the body of your message. Don't just put everything at the end. This isn't Jeopardy. People expect question-and-answer, not answer-and-question responses.

LONG STORY:

Wouldn't you like to make your messages easier for others to read and understand? If so, I have some news posting tips for you. If not, just ignore this. (Of course, if you don't want your messages easier to read and understand, it's not clear why you bother to send them in the first place. :-) I'm going to take a bit of time to explain this, because newcomers to Usenet often lack the cultural background were I to send a superbrief message.

Here's the issue: you appear to have quoted the entire message to which you were replying. Worst of all, you have done so by merely appending the complete message at the bottom. Folks are used to reading the original material first, then the follow-up. That's why it's called a "follow-up", you know. :-)

If all you want to do is forward a copy of the message, that's one thing, but here you seem to have just blindly pasted the complete old message at the end without providing any content. This is neither a proper public followup nor even a decent private reply. Here's why.

First of all, this is massive overkill -- you're supposed to trim your quoted text to only what you're replying to. Otherwise you'll probably violate the netiquette target quoting percentage of 50%. See below. This isn't really an issue of space (I know that a few bytes here and there mean less today than 20 years go), so much as it is of integrating your comments with the old material for continuity.

Second, putting everything at the bottom does little good. It doesn't provide the proper context. It's far too late. When you reply to someone's content, the reason you quote the previous message is so that you can provide some degree of contextual continuity. The best way to do this is to interleave what you're quoting with your responses to that particular piece. That means that you should provide a quoted portion, then address what the points therein, then another quoted section, etc.

For example, here's how followup replies *should* look if you'd like them to be more effective.

> Joe said we should eat noodles.

But I don't like noodles. They are a pain to prepare -- remember that what started this thread was how to cook using only a microwave, not real cooking -- and they provide you with very little sustenance in the long run. It's like eating cardboard, nutritionally speaking.

> He also suggests adding anchovies.

What is this fish fetish? Not all of us like the little minnows with the lingering briny taste swimming around our mouths for the next few hours or days. Can you imagine this on a date? Iccccch!

Notice how in the text above, alternate quoted passages are interleaved with new response text. Notice also that the new text far exceeds the old text. This is the way it should be.

Here's an excerpt from RFC 1855, which explains why this is bad. You can read the whole RCS at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html

- If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers understand when they start to read your response. Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!

If you are receiving this message in response to a news posting, please understand that all modern newsreaders provide a mechanism to fetch the parent article, so it is seldom necessary to quote the whole thing. Sometimes even mail readers provide this, depending on the mail headers and the list archival mechanism on your own system.

Here's a section from the essential netiquette guide, "A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community", which is available in news.announce.newusers. Perhaps your service provider neglected to point you at this newsgroup before you got swallowed up by all of Usenet. It's not only a good read; it's critical to understanding the culture you're now moving in.

Summarize What You are Following Up.

When you are following up someone's article, please summarize the parts of the article to which you are responding. This allows readers to appreciate your comments rather than trying to remember what the original article said. It is also possible for your response to get to some sites before the original article.

Summarization is best done by including appropriate quotes from the original article. Do not include the entire article since it will irritate the people who have already seen it. Even if you are responding to the entire article, summarize only the major points you are discussing.

It's even more annoying when people needlessly quote the original's automatic trailing matter, like signatures, adverts, or disclaimers. Please don't do that.

I'm honestly not trying to annoy you! I'm just trying to give tips about what works well in electronic messages, and what doesn't. This used to be standard fare before one got a Usenet account, but now something seems to be lost.

-- MTech Student, Reconfigurable Computing Lab, KReSIT, IIT-Bombay. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel. And if one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one? -- Virginia Woolf, "To the Lighthouse"

[Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when referring to powerfail recovery.]