Editing

[Monty J. Harder]

On 8/31/07, Jeremy Fowler <jeremy.f76 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> However, I would say most people besides USENET geeks from the 90's don't
> really give a hoot about proper trim and post and that its impossible to
> always reign in those who neglect proper grammar and syntax.
>

And old BBS sysops like me, who had to pay to move the mail via LD.

Also, I think the argument for filling up hard drives with email message
> length is a little outdated. In today's world of cheap 750GB hard drives, a
> few extra KB isn't going to a kill ya. Same goes for bandwidth, outdated
> argument. With all the different broadband solutions available today, if
> your still on dial-up... Well, its time to pony up and get a real internet
> connection. Besides, even on a 28.8 kbps dial-up connection running 3.60KB/s it would only take a couple extra seconds to download a few extra lines
> of text...
>

It's not 'a few extra KB' or a "few extra lines".  I get emails at work that
can be hundreds of KB each, just because a pretty background and expressive
font do that in LookOut, before you even start in quoting them to death.
And dialup is not an outdated argument for folks out in the boonies (Hi,
Oren!) who are forced to use satellites because they're not able to get
DSL.


>
> You can't control what someone sends to the list, but you can control what
> you read from them by using utilities, like gmail, that automatically clean
> up someone's message.
>

Actually, we could control it.  We could have a bot refuse any message with
more than a certain proportion of quoted quoted quoted quoted quotes.  It
could send back to the writer an explanation of why it's inconsiderate to do
that to the readers, and that we have higher standards than that.  But we
won't do that, because we don't have a consensus on where to draw the line.


> Agreed, its the writer's responsibility... In a perfect world, everyone
> would follow all the rules and there would be no need for topics like this.
> However, in the real world I use gmail and learn to look the other way.
>

In the real world, when the rules are broken, people are punished for it.
The bot could include an img tag to goatse for repeat offenders.  But since
corporate culture actively discourages trimming unecessary quotes (I've
actually caught crap for trimming at work), we don't really have rules.
Hell, the worst offenders for bad mail at my company are the high mucketies
themselves.  With their example, it's hopeless.
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