[Xitami] Linksys Router and Xitami

[Brian {Hamilton Kelly}]

In message <200202060143.OAA20886@pagoda.in.naos.co.nz>
   Ewen McNeill writes:

> The mailing list currently rejects posts bigger than 30KB in size.  In
> view of the excessive quoting that is going on, I'm tempted to reduce
> this even further.  Can anyone think of a good reason for allowing posts
> bigger than 10KB?  (The 30KB was set to allow people to include
> configuration examples; but generally they're best done as smaller
> snippets anyway.)

Whilst being a strong opponent of over-quoting, I don't believe there
should be any automatic restriction based on size (although obviously the
list doesn't want to be propagating the binary photograph of the poster's
dog that someone thoughtlessly attaches to their post).

What IS needed is some PERSONAL discipline on the part of some of the
posters: perhaps it is just that they've only ever used e-mail in the
context of an intra-office memo (at Ethernet speeds) --- they just "hit
reply", and then do nothing about trimming the quoted material, but leave
it in one congealing lump after their (sometimes few) words of wisdom.  

There really is NO need to quote the entirety of all the previous
messages in the thread. There is even less necessity to quote them all
underneath, totally out of context, especially when no one can see,
without a lot of guesswork and scrolling back and forth, just what "you
need to change the oojimaflip" implies.

Quote JUST enough to establish a context for your reply; if the reply is
just a single point, then cut out EVERYTHING apart from that point, and
put the quote UNDERNEATH it.  If replying to multiple points, do so one
at a time.  Configure your mailer so that it quotes previous messages in
this sort of style, with a "> " at the beginning of each line and an
attribution ("On such-and-such a date, so-and-so said:") above the quoted
text.

Oh, and DO quote SOMETHING; posts on a mailing list can arrive seriously
out of order, and often without the "clues" to thread them into context
automatically.

> Anyone who is actually seeking an answer should note that I pretty much
> ignore anything with more than one or two levels of quoting out of hand;

Sometimes it is necessary to retain some more levels (say where one
poster is refuting the answer given by one or two others to some original
question) but in general that is correct: one doesn't need the WHOLE
provenance of the question and the arguments.

When cutting out older material, ensure that the attribution is correct:
people get somewhat miffed if it's written that they said something that
they never had any hand in.

> the rest goes into my "to be answered when I get time" pile, and stays
> there until either (a) someone else answers it or (b) I get time.

Over-quoters please note the above: you are less likely to get a reply
from the very person with the greatest knowledge.  This will tend to
apply to other knowledgable people as well: they might not have time to
reconstruct the poster's thoughts out of the mess that is the stream-of-
consciousness in a big thread.

> Trimming quotes to only the most appropriate portions is
> _strongly_encouraged_.

Hear, hear.

The page <http://www.geocities.com/nnqweb/nquote.html> provides plenty
of justification for that point, and for the other matters I've raised.

The only other point is this nonsense of people writing in HTML.
Unfortunately, they often are blissfully unaware that it's happening.
Outlook Express and all the other "mailers" include a setting to
suppress this infelicity: sadly in some issues of the programs, the
default is to post in both ASCII and HTML.  That format can sometimes be
triggered when replying to such a message, under the control of another
setting.

If you can reject posts based on size, could you not do the same where
there's a "Content: multipart/alternative" in the MIME headers?

-- 
Brian {Hamilton Kelly}                                          bhk@dsl.co.uk
    "We have gone from a world of concentrated knowledge and wisdom to one of
    distributed ignorance.  And we know and understand less while being incr-
    easingly capable."              Prof. Peter Cochrane, formerly of BT Labs