Re: [Pan-users] 2 Feature Requests

[Jim Henderson]

Colin Leroy wrote:
> Well, not quoting anything on Usenet is quite unappreciated, so for me it
> is more of a user-educating feature than a bug :-)

That's as may be, however Usenet is not the only set of news servers out
there; in my case, I use a system that is entirely self-contained
(though it is replicated to Google - it is publicly available), and the
previous post is always there, so quoting is a waste of bandwidth.

But whether to quote or not quote is a religious discussion more than
anything.  I used to do support on CompuServe years ago, and the
arguements that forum leaders got into in there were quite spectacular
about whether or not quoting (or "barf-backs" as some people called
them) was appropriate.  Nobody ever changed their mind, either, because
everyone works differently.

All I want is some flexibility there to allow me to work the way I
work.  On usenet servers, I always quote because the replication of NNTP
messages isn't guaranteed, and different servers have different
expiration times based on a variety of criteria - so I agree that on
Usenet, quoting is a very important practice.

But on self-contained news servers (and there are quite a few out there,
for example, support-forums.novell.com, news.vmware.com,
news.microsoft.com, just to name 3), it's unnecessary and adds clutter
to otherwise easy-to-follow threads.

Jim