[TR] List notes

[Mark J Bradakis]

In one of the currently active topics, one of those involved wrote:
> I don't know why this didn't go thru the first time at noon. Cleaned 
> up some
> space on the bottom.

There are a number of reasons mail that folks intend to be sent to the 
list don't
make it.  You'd be surprised at the number of folks who can't figure out 
that
to send mail to triumphs at autox.team.net you simply send mail to
triumphs at autox.team.net.  On occasion you see messages that look like
replies to some message, a subject line like:

Subject: Re: topic1

In the body of the message, though, absolutely no reference to topic1,
but a new discussion on topic2.  What these folks leave out should be
an opening sentence like "I can't figure out how to send a new  email
to the list, so I used reply and am too lazy to edit the subject line."

But for the most part messages sent from a valid subscription address
to the proper posting address and get held back are simply too long.
Gee, I just ranted on about editing replies on another list, a few of
you might remember.

Basically the default behavior of many mail programs these days is
to include the *entire* original message as part of the text of a reply.
And people don't bother to edit out the unnecessary text.  And someone
replies to that reply, and the message gets longer and longer as the
previous posts needlessly  cascade on and on.

Now on the one hand, I like to see the line

    Support Team.Net  http://www.team.net/donate.html

repeated multiple times in messages, though most folks ignore
that anyway.  But there's also a lot of other stuff that gets repeated
that doesn't need to be included.  It simply wastes bandwidth [*],
fills up peoples' mailboxes sooner so they removed from the list
for no fault of their own, it makes the archiver work harder both
in indexing the repetitive text to begin with as well as returning
many copies in queries, when one would be sufficient.  Think of
it as a computer equivalent of a child repeating "are we there yet?"
over and over and over and over again.

I won't point out some of the most blatant recent examples, now,
will consider this message as hopefully enlightening a few of you.
I'll go back to my prestigious, highly-paid occupation as Team.Net's
chief byte duster and toilet scrubber.

mjb.


  *:  bandwidth - for those who don't understand this, think of it
as being like filling a swimming pool.  Which will fill it faster,
a fire hose or a garden hose?  The "pipe" that the Team.Net bits
travel through is close to the garden hose capacity.  People who
don't edit replies are kinking the hose, slowing things down for
everyone.