What is the protocol for getting into these discussions? Are catholics
allowed?
Am I being heard (communicating) out there? I is new to this. Help!
[From Bill Powers (990424.0822 MDT)]
Hi, Fred!
What is the protocol for getting into these discussions? Are catholics
allowed? Am I being heard (communicating) out there? I is new to this. Help!
Catholics are welcome as long as they don't expect us untheists to genuflect.
I'm illustrating what protocol there is, above. If you're replying to
CSGnet, you hand-type the first line above, so the reader knows who's
talking right away without having to scroll to the end of the message. In
the parentheses, you put the date and time in the form YYMMDD.HHMM, known
as the date-time stamp, followed in your case by EDT (Eastern Daylight time
-- I'm Mountain Daylight Time) insided the parentheses.
Note the excerpt from your post. When you use your e-mailer's "reply"
function (after highlighting the message to which you want to reply), you
get a new message screen with the message you're replying to reproduced,
each line starting with a ">" to show it's a quote. On the first line, the
computer inserts something like "On xx/xx/xx, Fred Good wrote:", which I
usually delete. In its place, I copy the date-time stamp of the message I'm
replying to, in our format, so just before I start replying I would insert
(if the following were actually your date-time stamp)
Fred Good (990424.1200 EST) --
That shows whom the reply is toom, or whose post it's about. It often
happens that one person will send several posts on the same day, which is
why we include the time. Some people just append a,b,c ... and so forth.
You can reply to any number of posts in one post; just precede each section
by the relevant name and date-time stamp.
The point now is to preserve only the parts of the other guy's message on
which you want to comment, deleting everything between those parts in the
quoted text. This minimizes sending the same material back and forth in
great gobs, which clutters up the internet and uses up your computer's
memory. Don't forget to delete everything from the last segment you cite to
the end of the other guy's post. I often forget.
A real no-no is to quote a four-page message in full, for the sole purpose
of adding the comment
Nice post.
... at the end. That's a real resource-waster.
Most people adhere to this format, making it easy to search for old
messages in your own archives. There's no penalty for ignoring it, except
that every now and then someone may complain that they can't find your old
posts, or don't know who sent a message. Lots of people (most) also put a
signature at the end, either by hand or using the e-mailer's ability to
append a signature file automatically.
Anything else? Oh, yeah --
Welcome aboard.
Best,
Bill P.