Cleaning and engine bay

I wonder where in the UK 'WA' is? ;-)

Chris

Written by John Rumm for the uk.d-i-y group but the same principles apply.

If you have been using the Home0wnersHub web site, you may have wondered why a number of posters seem rather confused by some of the messages you have been posting. Hopefully this post will make clear why this is happening.

Home0wnersHub (HOH) is one of a number of web sites that provide a gateway to one or more USENET newsgroups. In this particular case it connects to the USENET group "uk.d-i-y"

For details about this group, please read:

For some background and links about usenet groups and how they are normally used, please see:

Like good comedy, Timing is everything =======================================

Usenet groups are generally "ephemeral". Once a post has been sent to a news server, it will be shared around the world with other news servers. Depending on how busy the group is, and the storage space allocated by the server to the group, each server may only store messages for a few weeks or months before expiring them.

So when replying to a post, please take careful note of the date on which it was posted. There is little point in making a response to a post concerning a problem with someone's central heating, if the problem occurred in 2006 - One, they have probably fixed it by now, and two, most readers of your message won't be able to see what you are replying to - so it will make little sense!

(Although many news servers won't retain posts to a group for an extended period, once a post has been made and distributed to other servers, you have to assume that its never going to go away completely - there will always be a copy somewhere! You can't delete a message once posted. There are also archives of past usenet postings, google for example have groups.google.com that makes many years worth of posts to this group searchable).

Quoting =======

News reader software usually makes it easy to include in your message parts of the post you are replying to. This is called "quoting". Careful use of quoting - e.g. leaving in just enough of the original message in place, will help readers follow the thread of the conversation. Note that some users (especially sight impaired ones) will depend quite heavily on this quoted content to make sense of postings. If you don't include sensibly trimmed quoted content you will irritate many users who won't know what you are replying to. (and including too much, will irritate others!)

Tim