nothing unfamiliar about my face, either from the top or the bottom...or so her in doors tells me....
OH and Steve I'll only post serious replies when it hasn't allready been covered by some one, other wise Im just here for the "miniship" and a great place to get to know other Mini fans from across the globe....
How many forum posters does it take to change a light bulb?
1 to change the light bulb and to post that the light bulb has been changed
14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and how the light bulb could have been changed differently
7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs
27 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing light bulbs
53 to flame the spell checkers
41 to correct spelling/grammar flames
6 to argue over whether it's "lightbulb" or "light bulb" ... another
6 to condemn those 6 as anal-retentive
2 industry professionals to inform the group that the proper term is "lamp"
15 know-it-alls who claim *they* were in the industry, and that "light bulb" is perfectly correct
156 to email the participant's ISPs complaining that they are in violation of their "acceptable use policy"
109 to post that this forum is not about light bulbs and to please take this discussion to a lightbulb forum
203 to demand that cross posting to hardware forum, off-topic forum, and lightbulb forum about changing light bulbs be stopped
111 to defend the posting to this forum saying that we all use light bulbs and therefore the posts *are* relevant to this forum
306 to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior, where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best for this technique and what brands are faulty
27 to post URL's where one can see examples of different light bulbs
14 to post that the URL's were posted incorrectly and then post the corrected URL's
3 to post about links they found from the URL's that are relevant to this group which makes light bulbs relevant to this group
33 to link all posts to date, quote them in their entirety including all headers and signatures, and add "Me too"
12 to post to the group that they will no longer post because they cannot handle the light bulb controversy
19 to quote the "Me too's" to say "Me three"
4 to suggest that posters request the light bulb FAQ
44 to ask what is a "FAQ"
4 to say "didn't we go through this already a short time ago?"
143 to say "do a Google search on light bulbs before posting questions about light bulbs"
1 forum lurker to respond to the original post 6 months from now and start it all over again
Well where else would it start? The idea is that you START at the top, TRIMMING to context as you make your comments.
Which is why you TRIM TO CONTEXT. There is no need for you to leave all the previous irrelevance flowing in the wake of your one-liner. To do so merely displays either extreme ignorance, or total contempt for others who have to pay to download it.
Ah, so it's extreme ignorance in your case. How about when previous articles are either propogated differently, fail to arrive or someone has just joined the thread?
Usenet is a communications medium. If you want to communicate, the advice is to make it clear and concise if you want the best (relevant) response. Please yourself how you post, but don't be surprised when your posts are skipped over or killfiled by those best placed to help.
See if this makes it clearer:
[Credits: John Temperley uk.t.m. 11.03.03]
Top-posting makes posts incomprehensible.
Firstly: In normal conversations, one does not answer to something that has not yet been asked. So it is unclear to reply to the top, whilst the original message is at the bottom.
Secondly: In western society a book is normally read from top to bottom. Top-posting forces one to stray from this convention: Reading some at the top, skipping to the bottom to read the question, and going back to the top to continue. This annoyance increases even more than linear with the number of top-posts in the message. If someone replies to a thread and you forgot what the thread was all about, or that thread was incomplete for some reasons, it will be quite tiresome to rapidly understand what the thread was all about, due to bad posting and irrelevant text which has not been removed.
The idea is that you scroll down through the message, deleting parts which are not relevant to your reply (called "snipping"), then adding your reply in the correct context so it can be understood which part of the post you are replying to, and other people can comment on your reply keeping the context correct.
Because it is proper Usenet Etiquette. Check out the following URL:
formatting link
If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarise 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 Usenet, 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!
Top-posting inevitably leads to long posts, because most top-posters leave the original message intact. All these long posts not only clutter up discussions, but they also clutter up the server space. Assume that there are only 1000 news servers carrying this group, if you fail to trim 1kb of text from your post, that is 1Mb of space you have personally wasted due to your laziness. Now have 20,000 readers, you have just wasted 20 megabytes of other people's download time and disk space because you didn't see why you had to scroll through and trim unwanted posts.
Now have everyone in the newsgroup doing that - say 500 posts a day, each wasting 20MB - that's 10 gigabytes wasted per day. 300 gigs a month. 3.6 Terabytes a year.
Many people (particularly on a mobile phone group) have to pay for their Internet access by the minute, often using a low speed connection, and/or by the amount of data transferred (GPRS). It costs them money to download "unnecessary" material.
Is a few seconds of your time more important than the time and resources possibly wasted on other people's systems by some people not adhering to conventions and trimming their material?
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