How much to quote?

At 8:58 AM -0800 2/21/07, r2g wrote:
>I quoted the entire post and maybe that was "too much",

Yes, quoting the entire post is too much, and when I see that, I tend
to delete it all without reading carefully.

>but deleting every bit of reference to it just makes my post
>nonsensical, or makes it like a rant. This happened with previous
>posts of mine, even when I selected just small portions to quote,
>and I really don't get it, because looking at other posts, there
>doesn't seem to be a rule about how much or how little to quote,
>many posts are left alone with huge chucks of quotes, which is one
>reason why I assumed it was okay to quote the whole
>not-very-long-post I was responding to.
>
>If you guys have a rule about these things, by all means, let me know.

Here's the rule. Quote less. :-) However much you were planning to
quote, it's almost always too much. That's true of nearly every
mailing list out there. I strongly encourage everyone to read my
Mailing List Manners articles from 1999; they're still completely
relevant.

<http://db.tidbits.com/series/1141>

I'm sorry that we can't be entirely consistent. Right now, there are
three of us moderating: me, Andrew Laurence, and Joe Kissell. We have
different tolerances and spend different amounts of time editing
posts. Personally, I dislike heavy quoting and am more likely to trim
hard than Andrew and Joe. I also dislike long signatures (and
unrelated random funnies) and will trim those too. (No one on TidBITS
Talk cares what your phone number or snail mail address is!)

The reason is simple. TidBITS Talk has a highly stable group of
readers, all of whom receive every message, whether individually or
in a digest. There are also a number of people who come to the Web
archive, at which point they see entire discussions. Heavy quoting
and long signatures are just a waste of everyone's time and
attention, since they're duplicative of messages everyone has already
seen (or could see if absolutely necessary; remember that every
message contains a link to the Web archive in its header) or of
information that has appeared in every other one of your posts.

That's not to say that there should be no quoting, but a sentence or
two is usually sufficient to provide context so you don't have to
paraphrase the original in your reply.

In particular:

* Do not quote entire messages.

* Make sure to delete the "To unsubscribe" line at the bottom of the
original when quoting - that's personalized for every subscriber and
with it, anyone can unsubscribe you.

* Always post your reply _beneath_ the original. Top-quoting may work
acceptably in private mail situations, but it's horrible in mailing
lists and especially in digests.

* Always send email in plain text; if we have to edit, it's much
easier in plain text than in HTML.

Thanks!

cheers... -Adam

--
Adam C. Engst, TidBITS Publisher <http://www.tidbits.com/adam/>

Just to add a bit, speaking for myself...

>We have
>different tolerances and spend different amounts of time editing
>posts. Personally, I dislike heavy quoting and am more likely to trim
>hard than Andrew and Joe.

I tend to trim everything but the single (quoted) paragraph
preceeding your reply.

If you selectively trim the original message and quote only the bits
to which you are replying (like this message), I tend to leave it
intact.

>* Always send email in plain text; if we have to edit, it's much
>easier in plain text than in HTML.

HTML messages which require editing may simply be rejected. It's
simply too much hassle to edit the HTML formatting.

I'm also liable to reject, or delete without comment, messages which
are argumentative without contributing to the topic at hand. It's a
judgement call each time, but if the thrust of your post is "I
disagree", it falls into my filter.

--
Andrew Laurence
atlaurenuci.edu

I'd like to chime in with my 2 cents...

Adam said:

> I also dislike long signatures (and unrelated random funnies) and
> will trim those too. (No one on TidBITS
> Talk cares what your phone number or snail mail address is!)

I tend to leave signatures if they're a couple of lines or less,
though I'm not perfectly consistent about it.

> * Always post your reply _beneath_ the original. Top-quoting may
> work acceptably in private mail situations, but it's horrible in
> mailing lists and especially in digests.

Oh yeah. When moderating messages, I spend tons of time cutting and
pasting so that the quoted sections come before the replies, and I'd
sure enjoy doing less of that!

Andrew said:

> I tend to trim everything but the single (quoted) paragraph
> preceeding your reply.
>
> If you selectively trim the original message and quote only the
> bits to which you are replying (like this message), I tend to leave
> it intact.

I'm pretty much with Andrew on these points. I think that of the
three moderators, I probably have the highest tolerance for quoting,
but that may just be another way of saying that I'm sometimes lazy
when it comes to pruning.

> HTML messages which require editing may simply be rejected. It's
> simply too much hassle to edit the HTML formatting.

I've done this too. Occasionally I'll go to the bother of editing the
HTML, but we don't have a spiffy WYSIWYG interface for doing this:
we're not only editing raw HTML but doing so in a little field that
doesn't show line breaks. It's not fun. (And, of course, some email
clients make notoriously bad HTML in the first place, which makes it
even worse.) So, if you MUST use HTML, please at least follow our
"best practices" for quoting and signatures so that we don't have to
edit your messages!

If I may throw in a last request: We sometimes have to reject random
tech support-type messages to the list. Which ones we let through is
always a judgment call, but my overall goal is to keep the signal-to-
noise ratio reasonably high. So before posing a help request,
consider doing a couple of quick searches on Google, the Apple
discussion forums, and your favorite Mac help sites. You may find
that the answer is already out there and easily discoverable, and
that'll help us to keep this discussion focused on things more
closely related to TidBITS.

Joe

==

Joe Kissell
Senior Editor, TidBITS