OT--Taking on city hall

Harold,

Reasonable clipping makes bottom posts less irritating. Too bad not many have enough consideration to do it. Top posting causes less irritation. I wonder why more don't have enough consideration to put their silly one liners at the top?

Plonking helps eliminate the worst offenders.

Then your argument is with people who are too lazy to trim old content, rather than people who put it in a normal place.

Then trim it out. As I have done, and you, lazily, did not.

Winlock/Toledo

Harold, don't worry much about it right now--it's still a bit too early.....but thinking of heading up that way pretty soon, and I'll try and give you a jingle when I do.

I find that there is so much BS that the whole conversation can be clipped, and just a reply inserted.

As in this case, is there anyone out there who doesn't know what I'm saying, or what I'm responding to?

I didn't think so.

HTH

Steve

That reminds me of the old saying: ?He who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer?.

Abrasha

Yeah, You are obviously talking about "Taking On City Hall", as the subject indicates.

This thread needs to either die or get renamed.

How successful you are is going to depend a lot on how your property is zoned.

In my area a lot of properties < 5 acres were rezoned from agricultural to country residential. That brought them into a bunch of regulations concerning equipment and refuse. In short everything needs to be in a building or in some cases a fenced area that blocks the view from the road or other houses. Same rule applies to commercial vehicles parked in residential area.

If your area is being built up as residential you might be best off by building a fenced area adjacent to your shop. Often if its not visible from the road or other houses the required regulations are being met. A fence may also be cheaper than a court case.

Be business like in your communications. If you annoy someone sufficiently they have many perfectly legal ways to make your life difficult.

You may want to check directly w/ this neighbor of Harold's, just to make sure Harold isn't the reason he's moving. And mebbe track down the other sellers in recent sales... Some people, purely by dint of being themselves, can clear out a whole municipality.

IF that's actually the case, ( which I seriously doubt ) well...then I'd be quite honored if I were somehow able to help him out in furthering that endeavor.

The comparrison fails here because often more than one person is responding to a post. Therefore it is nice to know what part or which post is being answered. I use Netscape and the threads are fine but with 3, 4, or a dozen replying and sometimes to different parts of the post it makes a LOT more sense to quote below the appropiate cliped part of the original. ...lew...

:-) :-) :-) :-) ...lew...

I'll agre the "fools" that re-post the entire pages and pages of BS with a one liner at the end are truly idiots but I still prefer to see what is being replied to before I see the answer. ...lew...

Thats strange to me because my reader puts the cursor at the bottom and I have to back up delete all the unnecessary garbage. Different readers I guess. ...lew...

Sam wants a piece with a little geothermal activity. but not too much to shake the house.

John

The problem is the nature of Usenet: there is no guarantee that the message you will next read is the message following the last post you read. Propagation delays mean that you could be reading a reply to another posting. People who have short expire times on their Usenet servers may not see the original question, or it may not yet have propagated to that server. You have made the assumption that there is 'a' thread: the longer a discussion goes, the more likely that there will be a number of threads with the same root thread. This thread has already broken up into multiple threads.

Many people misunderstand the nature of Usenet and their newsreaders: some assume that it is like a web forum and that messages remain fixed in place and that others see the contents of a newsgroup as they do. I have even seen people trying to refer to other postings as "The message three up from this one", as if that makes any sense at all to anyone other than them (and at that point in time, too).

I notice that you say "I prefer to read" and "as soon as you [I] open the message". Usenet is not supposed to be about how everyone can cater to a particular reader's preferences, but to act as an efficient method of communicating one to many. This process is assisted by formatting messages in a way that reaches as many people as possible in a concise, clear and unambiguous manner. If you want your posting to be read and understood by as many people as possible, then you must spend the time writing in a way that make it worthwhile for the reader to spend the time reading your posting. Spelling, punctuation, layout, and tone all make a lasting impression on the reader. (This is not criticising any of these in John's posting - otherwise I'd have sent an email - its a plea to all of the posters out there.)

If I open a post and see four lines of text followed by a page of quoted text, then my desire to even read that four lines of text is reduced, since it shows a lack of courtesy in being not able to trim the material on which you are basing your reply. The inclusion of this material must be important, otherwise you would not have included it, right? And therefore I need to read it to fully understand your response, right? And so you are expecting me to read the text quoted below your response, a post I may (or may not) have read, to understand your reply to this. Well, I feel that it is lazy, and since I read many newsgroups and have only a limited time to do so, asking me to try to work out how your response relates to the following quoted text is not going to make me as sympathetic to your post as it could be.

Quoting no text at all is roughly equivalent (in my opinion) since again we have to do extra work to determine what the reply is in response to.

If you say "Well, I'm in a hurry, so I can't be expected to cut out all the non-relevant lines" then you are asking us to do this work for you when we read your posting: by top posting without trimming you are telling us you have not bothered to spend time to write a careful and considered opinion on some topic. I submit that the "Yeah, I agree!" postings at the bottom of a slab of quoted text indicates that you didn't spend any time thinking out your response - therefore the value of your response is going to be quite low to me.

So, what do I do? Well I use a newsreader that allows me to easily killfile people. If, as I find in some newsgroups, someone tends to post a single line at the end of over a page of text, they get added to the killfile for a time, usually two weeks. This is the extreme case though. Life is too short to scroll down pages of quoted text to find "ROTFLMAO" or "I agree", or indeed just to find a posting that just contains the aforementioned single lines. Seeing it at the top of the posting has saved me the scrolling, but leaves the same bad feeling in me about the poster.

There are some cases where it *is* more appropriate to top post - such as in emails where you might need to see the context to understand all the issues. But, I don't get dozens of emails a day on the same topic and would be just as annoyed by top posting in email if I had to read the same number of emails as I manage to read of Usenet postings. Often, emails have to be forwarded onto someone else, and this means they need the context without having to be sent all the preceding emails and try to work out the thread. That is not the case for Usenet.

Just because your newsreader (Microsoft's Outlook Express) puts the cursor at the top of the quoted text does not make it right, any more than arguing that PCs are meant to have viruses since Windows has so many security flaws. In the early days of Usenet, many newsgroups readers placed the cursor at the end of quoted text and even prevented posting unless your added content exceeded the quoted text.

Some newsreaders allow you to thread postings by their Subject line, some by Author, some by Reference. Threading by reference allows some newsreaders to graphically show how a thread splits up. Good newsreaders allow a reader to quickly read the posts they are interested in - the text-based nature of Usenet makes it more information dense than forums and Google Groups. But telling your audience to, "Get a better newsreader", is going to alienate some of your audience - after all you don't know what limitations they may have on using a better way of reading your postings. Some people don't have a choice, and yet they could be the people who have the information you want or be the people you want reading your posts.

At the end of the day, it's about communication. If you can save one reader a few seconds, then you have saved hundreds if not thousands the same time - it all adds up. And they will thank you for it: not necessarily by overt actions, but in the overall impression that your postings make on them ("Win Friends and Influence People"). That is why bottom posting after appropriate quoting has been found over the years to be the best quoting method.

Bill Lee

What BS is this: City Hall, Tractor-reconditioning, or Top Posters? I can't tell since I think I have marked the posting that you are responding to as 'Read' (or maybe not - I can't tell from your posting if I have read it or have yet to read it).

I have no certainty what you are responding to, but I have an idea it might be regarding Top Posting.

Let me see....

1) Showing the detailed headers in your posting. 2) Extracting the References: header. 3) Looking at the last entry on the line:

4) Opening this referred posting in a new window.

Ah, I see what it is about: Dave Hinz wrote,

Ah, yes Much clearer and faster than appropriate quoting and paraphrasing!

Well, since I didn't read your posting until some time after reading the posting you were responding to, with other posts read in between, then I would have to say: "No, your posting did not help".

Bill Lee