Boston area aluminum welding shop?

I know of a guy near Taunton that's a wiz with aluminum. Is that local enough?

Yes, that's close enough!

I can be reached at:

adam 'at' airraidsirens 'dot' com

Thanks!

OK, but you should know that because you're posting from google, and your posts don't include any context, people don't know what or who this is in response to unless the go out of their way to back-track the thread.

I'll pass this along to him this weekend.

Eide

Not "people" in general, only people who don't know how to use their newsreaders or who are reading news from news servers with poor thread completion issues. In your case, I believe you're looking for the slrn command 'ESC p'.

When posting to Usenet, you should generally _not_ quote chunks of a previous post text "for context" like you would in an email. There are times when it's appropriate, of course, for example I do it above with your comments specifically because of the thread-following difficulty you're having. Usenet posts get distributed to millions of servers worldwide where such a data redundancy is an unnecessary and huge waste of computer resources. The whole point of threaded news is that your newsreader does the work of the linking the threads using the message reference IDs. When this is achieved, quoting of the post immediately previous is normally unnecessary.

Google is not the problem, by the way, Google handles the message and reference IDs correctly. It sounds to me like you have some beef with Google or Google posters that is misguided.

-Adam

It's more than that. It's about communication to others, in a way that makes it easy for them to understand what you've written, or to be able to make the decision that they do not need to read further. If you want others to be influenced by what you write, then you need to make it easy for them to understand both the content and context of what you say, and to be inclusive of your possible audience, rather than exclusive.

Correct, since email quoting is usually done with top posting to maintain full context (often for CYA). The accepted rules for Usenet have always been "appropriate quoting", where redundant or extraneous material is removed (trimmed) and comments made after the relevant quote left in. The opposite of top posting is not quoting the entire message to which you are replying and placing your reply after this (often mistakenly called bottom posting). Early 'good' newsreaders often enforced having your contribution larger than that which you were quoting to avoid the "Yes, I agree", or "Me too" single line postings at the end of multi-page quoted text.

And others who aren't using Google Groups, and sometimes even those who are. The reason for this I have outlined two paragraphs down.

The computers handle this relatively well automatically - the weak link is the human in the process. Although there are many forum websites now out there, I still think Usenet read through a specialised newsreader is the most efficient way of reading news and provides the best signal/noise ratio. The biggest waste of resources are probably the binary newsgroups, spam, off-topic politics and full quoting (and probably metadiscussions like this), not a line or two of appropriate quoting.

I personally find appropriate quoting quite useful. Where reference IDs completely fall down is where the article to which you are replying has not yet reached the news server you are using, or has reached it and has been expired out. In both these cases the reference ID is completely useless in trying to figure out what you are responding to. If you say "You should be using one system: my system, Google Groups", then I would respectfully disagree with you. Usenet is not like a forum website managed by one server in one location and articles may take time to propagate articles through the many systems that contribute to Usenet. Replies take time to propagate back through the systems to the originator, sometimes minutes, hours or days; sometimes never.

This isn't about 'First Amendment'; Usenet extends beyond the nominal borders of the United States of America, this isn't about NetCopping: I have no way of enforcing what you can or can't say in this newsgroup, it is an attempt to convince you that there is a better method of communication that follows conventions developed over 20+ years of Usenet. In fact, it really isn't an attempt to convince you, but maybe a hope that it will: my audience is the readers of this article who may have been swayed by your article to believe that your way is the best way.

In fact, it would have been easier to killfile you than to spend time writing this article, yet I think that you could have much that is worthwhile reading. Two clicks away from oblivion (at least to me) yet your views are worth debating. Such is the nature of Usenet.

My experience with Google is that their groups works, but there are far more useful Usenet readers. Indeed I preferred the ancestor of Google Groups, 'dejanews'. Google Groups reliance on reference IDs can be a bad thing in reading threads, since you can't dissociate them from an original article in the case of topic drift: almost inevitable in long running threads. Thus you may miss an important thread since it is classified under it's original subject and thereafter referred to by the original Reference ID.

Cheers, Bill Lee

Bill, I agree with you on this. And no, I'm not suggesting that everyone use Google Groups. I only use it because it's the most convenient way for me to access Usenet at work behind the various service restrictions here. At home I use MT-NewsWatcher on OS X.

My objection to posts like Dave Hinz's above is not so much that he's spreading misinformation, but that he jumped into this discussion thread with no advice on Boston area aluminum weldors. He could plainly see the title of my post, and if he was not interested or too lazy to type a keystroke to see what I was replying to, he should have moved on without comment. I asked a simple on-topic question and was not looking for a discussion on the best newsreader, quoting habits, top-posting, etc.

Furthermore, a quick Google query on "Dave Hinz" shows that he likes to derail good discussions with this kind of behavior in all different usenet groups, just to re-read his own opinions. It seems he's even got something of a usenet celebrity troll status for being the world's stupidest self-appointed netcop.

-Adam (13-year usenet veteran)