A request for all Native Nutritioners - posting etiquette

[Guest guest]

Hey folks,

This list has gotten very heavy on the volume again as of late. It can

be very frustrating concerning post etiquette. Below is a post I made

awhile back on posting etiquette. I have revised a few things since then. I

would ask that all read it and humbly consider what I say.

You don't have to follow it. I'm not the list owner. Nor is it directed

at any one person. But it does help, IMO, when such stuff is generally followed.

thanks,

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Hi folks,

I have a ton of posts from this list that I have yet to read, but as I

am perusing them I have noticed a few things that makes reading them

much more difficult. So below I have listed some suggestions that might

make handling the volume on this list much easier.

Note: these are *suggestions* not orations from Mt. Sinai, so please do

not take personal offense. I'm only trying to help make the experience on

this list as painless as possible. And as always, with everything that

is mentioned on this list, you are free to ignore any and everything I

say.

1. Top posting makes it difficult to read and follow the logic of a

response to a post, especially a long one. It also makes it difficult to

keep a logical flow when responding to a top poster who is responding to

someone else.

What is top posting? It is when you respond to a post by putting your

reply at the top of the previous message rather than right after the

part of the message you are responding too.

There seems to be an awful lot of that as of late.

This is particularly annoying when you have a long response and it is

not immediately apparent what or who you are responding to. Then one has

to read your long post and often an equally long previous message only

to find that the portion you were responding too is buried toward the

very bottom of the previous post.

Unless you are extremely judicious like Idol in your top posting

(and he is the only top poster I have ever come across that I can read

without difficulty) I would suggest you avoid it.

I would imagine a good rule of thumb would be if you can read your

response and the previous post without any scrolling, then top posting

is probably okay although it still hampers a multi-thread post.

Personally there are some posts I don't respond to simply because I

don't want to have rearrange the paragraphs so people know what I am

talking about.

Better for most of us to answer immediately below the section to which

we are responding.

Having said that, please be judicious about bottom posting as well (as I

note in #2). Putting a one sentence response at the end of a long post

can be just as annoying as a long top post.

2. Related to the above is dead posts. Please please please remove all

aspects of the previous post that is not germane to your response. Some

top posters will answer with one line and then leave all the rest of the

previous post intact. Or some folks will answer after the whole body of

a previous message with just a couple of lines that only pertain to a

portion of the message.

Some will answer within the body of the message while still leaving

intact large portions of the message which have nothing to do with their

response. And others have 4 or 5 previous messages following their

response.

Or scrolling through a particularly long post only to find an " okay "

planted somewhere in the middle.

To make it easier on all of us, delete the dead portion of the posts.

3. As we have learned in the many off topic posts, it is very helpful

when one either changes the subject line to match such a change in the

reply or adds a tag to the current subject line to indicate its emphasis.

And while it is obvious on off topic posts, it is just as helpful for *on

topic* messages.

4. Please make sure you wrap your text when responding. If you don't and

someone is reading your post at the website, then it blows out the

formatting as one cannot see your message in the current window, but has

to scroll across the entire page to read it.

4. If you are replying in the body of a message,

please find a way to clearly set off your current remarks against any

previous remarks by you or someone else. There are many ways to do this

so I'm not going to insult anyone's intelligence by making suggestions.

But I just read two posts where I couldn't tell what was new, what was

old, and who was saying what.

And it does help to either leave the email address or the name of the

person you are responding to in a post. There have been several posts

where both the name of the previous poster and the email were stripped

and I had no idea who was being answered.

5. If you feel the need to get mad at someone on list, I would suggest

you wait a day or two before responding. There really is no place for

cheap shots or below the belt shots publicly, as no one has to respond

immediately.

One of the severe tests of maturity is not only the ability to agree to

disagree, but to do so agreeably. And I don't mean without emotion or

intensity, as there are some strong writers and personalities on this

list. I mean without personal ad hominem attacks. You can wait a day, a

week, a month, or even two months as in Mike 's case before

responding. And if your anger still burns even then at someone's *ideas*

such that you have to denigrate their *person*, then maybe the problem

isn't with that person.

6. I'm not opposed to one liners like thank you and that was great, etc.

but they can be annoying when accompanied by LONG text. Again, I think

the dead post idea would apply here.

7. I think this is a great list personally. I learn from it all the

time, even from people with whom I have profound disagreements. I wish I

had the time to really engage. I still see some posts on NT

Politics that make me drool, and I have deliberately left alone some

posts on NN I KNOW would have been very extended had I joined in (the

feminism thread immediately comes to mind).

At any rate, these are just my opinions on how to keep this list

manageable.

Thanks for listening,

FWIW,