soh@shiva.trl.oz (kam hung soh) (04/10/90)
I enjoy reading comp.sys.amiga, but I am annoyed by many new articles which consist of long slabs of quoted articles and cute or silly one liners and long signatures. If you must do a lot of quoting, could you please warn readers in the header or in the body of the article? For example, use the ^L code (formfeed or whatever is appropriate) and give readers a chance to decide whether to read your article. If authors wish to insult each other, do it using email or *.flame, not in the general newsgroup. I am just an average programmer who wants a bit of light reading during lunch, so I do not like wading through pages of repeated text and wasting my time. I appeal to authors to show some restraint and consider who the readers of their work will be before sending an article or a follow up. What do other readers feel about this matter? ----------------------------------- Soh, Kam Hung Telecom Research Laboratories, P.O. Box 249, Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia email: h.soh@trl.oz.au tel: +61 03 541 6403
acliu@skat.usc.edu (Alex C. Liu) (04/10/90)
In article <1294@trlluna.trl.oz> soh@shiva.trl.oz (kam hung soh) writes: >I enjoy reading comp.sys.amiga, but I am annoyed by many new >articles which consist of long slabs of quoted articles and cute >or silly one liners and long signatures. If you must do a lot >of quoting, could you please warn readers in the header or in the [Stuff Deleted] >What do other readers feel about this matter? > >----------------------------------- >Soh, Kam Hung >Telecom Research Laboratories, P.O. Box 249, Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia >email: h.soh@trl.oz.au tel: +61 03 541 6403 I agree with you! (Sorry, I just Couldn't Resist! :-) ______________________________________________________________________ Alex C. Liu | INTERNET: acliu%skat@usc.edu Voice: (213) 749-2730 | BITNET: acliu%skat@gamera Q-Link: Alejandro | UUCP: ...!usc!acliu
chrisl@caen.engin.umich.edu (Chris Lang) (04/11/90)
In article <1294@trlluna.trl.oz> soh@shiva.trl.oz (kam hung soh) writes: >I am just an average programmer who wants a bit of light reading >during lunch, so I do not like wading through pages of repeated >text and wasting my time. I appeal to authors to show some >restraint and consider who the readers of their work will be >before sending an article or a follow up. > >What do other readers feel about this matter? I feel exactly the opposite. If I see a message which is obviously a followup to a previous one, and I can't tell what the referenced message was about in the first few lines, I chuck it. Unless the message is a general comment on a major thread of conversation, or the author paraphrases the referenced message, I have better things to do with my time than try to dig back through one of the hundreds of messages I've read in the past couple days. If I want light reading I'll read the newspaper, but I read Usenet for information. (This is not a flame of any sort; I'm merely pointing out that some people have different ideas of "light reading" :-) I would agree, though, that including over a page of quoted material without a single comment on it is pretty absurd, it's doubtful that much context information is needed, unless it's a VERY heavy concept. And then, of course, there are those people who insist on quoting the entire article verbatim and tack on a "I think this is a good idea, too" at the end or something; these people should be forced to read Apple press releases until they can do it with a straight face. -Chris -- Chris Lang, University of Michigan, College of Engineering +1 313 763 1832 4622 Bursley, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109 chrisl@caen.engin.umich.edu WORK: National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, 900 Victors Way, Suite 226, Ann Arbor, MI, 48108 +1 313 995 0300 "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." - Ralph Waldo Emerson