Hey, some of you, cut it out!--God damn it, please

[David Casseres]

I wrote

>Do not, I repeat, do not, please, pay any attention to the gravely 
>misguided person whom I have quoted below.  When replying to a message in 
>a public forum, it is absolutely necessary to quote enough of what you're 
>answering so that people can pick up the context.  Mr. Krafft has 
>obviously not been on the net long enough to have experienced trying to 
>sort out what is going on when they read something that just sez "Well I 
>suppose you're right, but on the other hand, what about that Osbie Feel, 
>eh?"

Well, and now I need to clarify a bit.  I do not want to find myself 
reading things that I can make no sense of because I have no context for 
them.  I do not want to find myself resorting to searching archives for 
context because the only clue I've been given is someone's name or a 
subject line.  So I continue to insist that in many cases, the only 
reasonable course is to quote *enough* of the context to make your own 
contribution intelligible to someone who doesn't happen to have read the 
antecedent posts closely.

But of course, it *is* stupid and inconsiderate to quote *more* than 
enough.  And as Andrew has pointed out, it *is* a damned good idea to 
look over what you are about to post and see whether it could be 
unbloated a bit.  God nose, if we all did that, a lot of worthless posts 
would never occur in the first place, let alone being re-quoted ad 
nauseam.

What is "enough"?  Well, if we paid attention, the question would not 
arise.

So while I think it was excessive to ask that *all* quoting be abolished, 
Mr. Krafft, I recognize that you were in the grip of some genuine 
annoyance and I'm sorry I said to pay no attention to you.


Cheers,
David