Re: [Pan-users] 2 Feature Requests

[Jim Henderson]

"J.B. Moreno" wrote:
[...]
> > 1.  Option to NOT QUOTE ANY of a message being replied to. (Preference
> > selectable)
> > 2.  Option to "paste text as quotation" per Netscape 4.x (and also Moz,
> > at least 1.1 Alpha does have it, I just checked)
> > 3.  Option to "quote selected text" is fine as it is.

> OK, as you say that is clear enough.  But there are problems with 1 -- even
> as an option.  Namely, that on non-private servers it is rarely a good idea
> (and even there it's iffy -- people do come into a thread late and
> interspresed comments are easier to understand), and that's where most of
> the use will take place.  Also, by having an option your are inherently
> encouraging it, and do you want to do that for people that may not be aware
> of all the possibilities (and when Pan becomes cross platform this becomes
> an even bigger issue).

General USENET etiquette states (taken from
http://www.newsreaders.com/~link/nwman/Usenet.html):

"Avoid unnecessary quoting. For example, it is considered very bad form
to quote all of a long article and then add a single line of text saying
"me too". Take the time to edit the quoted text to the bare minimum.
Only quote text which is directly relevant to your replies. Place your
replies so that they immediately follow the relevant sections of quoted
text. Don't quote people's signatures. This convention is such a
tradition on Usenet that many news servers are configured to reject
postings with more quoted text than new text[9]. "

There are two ways to approach the problem of editing cited articles:

1.  Quote the whole thing and edit.

2.  Quote the necessary parts only.

The two are different ways of working.

In all my years participating in newsgroups of some form or another,
accessing forums on Compuserve, and participating in private BBS
discussion areas, the subject of quoting as been a very highly religious
discussion.  Why?  Because it's based on a personal preference as to how
you use newsgroups.

Some people even would go so far as to argue that "your decision not to
quote the message you're replying to impacts my ability to use
newsgroups the way I want to".  Well, tough beans.  It's not about how
you work, it's about how I work.

For many users of newsgroups, quoting relevant sections is a "here's
what I was reading when I was thinking what I'm writing".  Some of us
don't write verbose posts every time we write an article.  So it's MORE
work for us to delete MORE text that's not relevant.

Some people feel compelled to reply to every aspect of an article (and
in some cases, it's even warranted!) - so quoting the whole article by
default for them makes a whole lot of sense.

Hence the suggestion that it be a preference.  Make the default to quote
everything, I really don't care.  I just want to be able to turn it off
because I end up deleting more text than I need to quote 99.999% of the
time.

What the preference does is encourge PROPER use of quoting, as defined
by the general rules of netiquette:  Quote no more than you need to.

Making the only option to quote everything encourages bad habits; the
bad habits in turn waste disk space on the news servers, increasing the
scroll rate of messages on that particular news server.  Quoting less
means longer article retention for the amount of disk space allocated to
the news server.  This is a *good* thing.

Jim