Re: Quotes and other BB Code things
@Dark: well, I've been quoting messages I reply to for years, and find that briefly answering to a well-chosen quote is simply more aesthetic and clear than paraphrasing. That's not to say that a conversational style is out of the question, just that in most contexts, especially email, I find that taking the time to choose and reply to a portion of a message produces much more clarity and terseness than trying to reconstruct the dialog in a summary before responding. Every time I blow away a message in order to reply with a one-liner I feel like I'm disrespecting the person who went to the trouble of articulating what they wanted to say, in favour of laziness, and all because re-reading a part of the message is irritating to the demographic of users for whom re-reading a message, or a portion of it, is actually painful rather than a productive refresher of the conversation at the point I replied. And even with that consideration, I still end up quoting anyway, in or der to answer point-by-point to a particularly long message, or get in a humorous quip that isn't possible if you summarise. About the only time I don't quote is when my response is to an entire message; in that case I paraphrase or, in very exceptional cases where the message is going into a log, I top-post the immediately following message. So paraphrasing, to me, seems like a very sloppy and lazy approach. No doubt some of this is down to pure preference and an observance of "Netiquette", but there's no doubt that it's absolutely necessary in practice in certain online venues I communicate on (think technical mailing lists) and also that, while email has very nearly the immediacy of a conversation, it isn't actually a conversation; for example, many people will be picking up threads from email archives, or coming in from search engine queries, and it's very important for those people to benefit from the messages as well. But on a board like this, where the only way to read a message is to read it's corresponding thread, or on a blindness mailing list where nobody cares what the heck the form is so long as they can get the content, and especially if it has a readable archive like Google Groups which actually works very much like a forum itself, this is much less appreciated. I've long since given up trying to explain the necessity of netiquette to many blind listers, because it just isn't important to them. And honestly, what does it really matter? Netiquette is for situations where it does matter.
Top-posting is posting your reply above the message being replied to. Please don't do that. Blow away the message and reply to the message in your own words without quoting; that way we don't have to suffer the annoyance of having to page down several messages in a top-posted train-wreck to find all of the context necessary to understand your response. Or, of course, you can quote in context ju st what is needed, allowing the reader to read from top to bottom and understand what you are saying.
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