CompuServe Messages

/* I know you like quoting messages in your replies, but 8 lines of quotation for 2 lines of reply seems a little… excessive. */ Hi Evan! 🙂 Hey dude, you're slacking off… I've been overquoting for months… what took you so long? <g> /* I'll admit that quoting has its place, but generalized quoting (called cascading) is really a hold-over from USENET, where there are no threads. */ Actually I find far more functionality in it for the benefit of the people I'm conversing with. They quoted replies may get back to me by as much as a week later, and as I'm on 5 channels right now (Compuserve only being one of them), monitoring 3 forums for NAAUG traffic (average mail about 500 messages a week), it gets a little hairy trying to put "a little thought" into replying without a frame of reference. And I've had too many responses that got back from me late where the other person would send a message saying "hunh?" It's Compuserve's problem. We're paying for the usage. And seeing some of the messages that go through here (huge) which don't interest me sometimes, I don't feel I'm putting any unnecessary burdens on too many people. /* With a little thought you can reply without quoting, yet relate the subject to the original message. */ I can, maybe (I've got to upgrade my RAM), but a lot of other folks can't, and the subject header is not reliable enough after a day's threads to describe the frames of reference. Look at the subject header on this one! Mercury. Yeah, I get it. Sure. 🙂 Anyway, it just seems weird to hear from you after so long regarding this. But then again you are the [WeirdTM]… you're entitled! I can try to cut back on the quotes, but I mainly do it for the benefit of others to tap in. The NAAUG/UsrGrp section is meant to be a big invite, and it's hard to get people to jump in when all they see is a blurb. If they see the remnants of what might look like an interesting discussion, we have served our purpose in our section. Hope you won't feel to offended if we continue overquoting once in a while. And as much as I wish I could say I always know what a response to me is regarding, I all too often use the quote to remind myself during the reply what I'm trying to respond to. Side note: most of the messages I receive have more than one question. I found myself using a lot of "regard blah blah blah" which took as much space as the original quote. Finally, I regulate my quoting fairly well with the replies I get. I don't understand why even an insane level of overquoting would cause anyone a problem other than their wish to have to download less. With the expectations I and NAAUG have of increasing the traffic on these forums multiple times over, no quoting at all will not help in this effort. It's only going to get busier as word gets out that all this is all going on. As a friend of mine said a few weeks ago when Compuserve seemed a bit slow… "Welcome to the information highway… expect traffic jams". 🙂 p.s. what have you been up to lately, will you be at AEC, and are you attending the NAAUG annual conference in conjunction with Autodesk University this year? I'll be at the NAAUG booth at AEC if you'd care to drop by. It's been a while. 🙂 -dave