In the past I've seen long flame wars erupt over this. So you can imagine how pleased I am at how everyone is handling this. ;') I'm not nit picky about this. I have my opinions but as long as it hasn't come up on it's own, I'm not going to go all control freak. Here are my opinions: Post so it's understandable to someone following the thread. Don't try and contain the entire thread in your reply, they can go to the List Archives if they don't remember what it was about. But leave enough of the original so your reply is in context. Trim. If it's short, top posting is fine, if it is a couple of paragraphs you feel you need to quote, bottom post. If it is many points in one email you want to respond to, then post below each quoted portion you are responding to so it makes sense. But please, please, put a blank line between. Here's what I mean: > Important point that someone made about a thousand monkeys making > printed circuit boards with typewriters. See how hard it is to pick that out without a blank line? Get 5 or 6 paragraphs like that and it is very difficult to scan quickly. Making it worse is differences in quoting. The standard has always been an angle bracket and one space at the beginning of each quoted line. Unfortunately some mail programs seem to be set to only put the angle bracket and space at the beginning of each paragraph. > So a quote looks like this, add on a few sentences of stuff and it gets hard to tell when I add on my reply whether there's a blank line or not. Here's my reply, without a blank line it looks like part of the quote, or maybe 3 lines of the quote look like my reply. Even worse is HTML email. The list strips it, so the neato colors you see don't show up. So the rest of us see 5 lines of text without anything to differentiate between the quoted portion and the reply. Steve, the moderatin' moderator PS if anyone has noticed a "thank you" they've sent on list has gone missing, it's because I delete them from the archives after a few days if the "thanks" is followed by 3 pages of 5 messages worth of discussion. The list has had good ideas and info from day one and I'd like to delay the eventual dissappearance of that, at least until we all have our printable solderable conductive ink printers. ;')
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Re: trimming / bottom posting
2004-01-30 by Steve
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