"mbb" wrote in message
...


"David Hill" wrote in message
...
".... Why do people like the answer before the question? ...."

Possibly because some people don't seem to know how to EDIT. threads.
You get a whole string repeated time after time and possibly just 2 or 3
words added, and I for 1 am sick of having to scroll through anything up
to
100 lines to try to find the new bit

--
David Hill

As someone looking to improve my Usenet skills, I see two problems. I
agree
with the earlier post that having the 'cart before the horse' does make
for
poor reading of a thread, but that presupposes that you can read the
whole
thread in one message, rather than reading the same set of responses over
and over again - a real waste of bandwidth, I think.

I do also agree with David, that scrolliing through pages of messages &
replies, just to read an off topic couple of lines, is a pain - ( which is
why I initially welcomed top posts, I admit).

Is the answer to have a posting, plus replies, each of which only contains
it's own text? We would then not be using bandwidth unnecessarily, and
catching up with posts would be quicker. (I appreciate that we are using
a
variety of Newsgroup clients).

Unfortunately it does not work when you get replies to replies and replies
to replies to replies and replies which refer to more than one earlier stage
of the thread.
The only sensible thing is for each contributor to try and snip whatever
he/she thinks is irrelevant to what he/she is trying to say. But, *please*,
when you snip, it is good manners and useful if you were to replace the
snipped part with a simple indication "[snip]". This alerts a subsequent
reader to the fact that some snipping has occured, and he/she can look at
earlier versions of the thread to see if the snipped stuff was context or
not.

Sorry to go off-topic - if anyone can point us to authorative Newsgroup
etiquette sources, that would be appreciated.

Somewhere there must be a set of rules for this newsgroup. In those rules
the suggestions for good posting might be listed. That certainly is so in
the case of another ng in which I participate. Moreover, the rules of that
ng are reposted approximately once monthly.

[Franz Heymann]


regards, mbb