Virtual House Cleaning Time

[Guest guest]

Okay Gang -- it's cleaning time again here on the Chronic Pain list

So, grab your virtual broom and your virtual dust cloth!

Well all right, it's not that kind of cleaning.

I've been noticing lately that many people (including some long time

members) are not making the effort to consistently tidy up their

replies before they send them to the list. This means that we

volunteer moderators have to do double duty before a post ever makes

it to the group. If each person takes the time to clean up their own

replies, then a volunteer won't have to spend so much time making sure

that the people who read this list, won't be wading through tons of

repeated stuff and triple Yahoo tack ons.

So what can we do as posters you ask? (Well you didn't ask, but I'm

yappy so I'll tell you anyway:-)

Regardless of what email program you use or whether you use web based

email - when you hit the Reply button, the nice clean area where you

get to type your new post shows up on your computer screens. The

previous poster's message shows up too and also all that gobbledegook

that Yahoo adds to many of the messages.

If you just type your reply and hit the send button, then your post,

plus all of the previous post, plus all the old Yahoo junk, plus new

Yahoo junk, gets sent to the list.

Now this isn't that big of a deal if we are getting individual emails.

We can just read the new post and disregard the rest. However, many

of our members get the Chronic Pain messages in Digest form. That

means that lots of messages are put together in one email and then

sent out to the Chronic Pain member.

If we don't each delete all the extra junk from our email, then the

volunteer moderators have to do it. Either that, or we have to send

the message back to the members, reminding folks to clean up their

replies.

Why? Because if all that junk is left in - then the people who

receive the Digest and the people with vision problems have to wade

through all the junk people were just too lazy to bother to delete.

So please, after you hit the reply button and BEFORE you type your

pearls of wisdom, please take a few seconds to delete all the stuff

that doesn't need to be sent back with the replies. Usually that

consists of most of the last person's email note and all of the Yahoo

tack on junk. If you do it BEFORE you start typing your reply, you

won't forget to do it!

It only takes a few seconds to clean up your responses while typing

them and it saves the moderators the hassle of cleaning up behind

you. The moderators (me included) are CP'ers too, so by not cleaning

up your replies, you are dumping a lot of extra work on us.

Please just use your mouse and highlight all the stuff you want to

delete and then just press the delete key. The the junk will be gone

and you can tidy up any stray bits and send your message happily on to

the group.

We each want to read what's been posted. If there's too much junk for

the Digest, vision impaired, and web based readers to scrounge

through, they just give up Unfortunately, the post they miss may be

the one that held an answer to their problem.

Also - please use paragraphs when you type. Put in those very

important white spaces.

I seriously doubt that any of you would have made it this far in

reading my long post, if I had sent it in one big block instead of

breaking it into paragraphs. Reading block posts is difficult for

people with good vision and next to impossible for people with vision

impairments. Unless we get fed up and send them back to the poster,

we moderators take most of the block posts, open them in another

program, split them into paragraphs and then post them to the group.

It is very time consuming.

It would be so much easier, if each member would take the few seconds

needed to hit the enter key and make paragraphs. We all learned how

to write in paragraphs when we were in primary school. Just because

we are typing to the internet, doesn't mean that we should throw all

grammar rules out the window.

Thank you in advance from the bottom of my pointy little heart.

--

Lyndi

P.S. If you're a computer newbie and don't really understand what I'm

asking of you, please post to the group and we will all walk you

through learning how to delete. It isn't difficult and once you've

done it a few times, it becomes a habit.