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. ;')