[B-Greek] Administrivia: Cut the fat (messages, that is) , please
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Sat Feb 13 05:59:57 EST 2010
Dear B-Greekers:
I might have called this "Top Ten things administrators of discussion lists don't think are funny," but that wouldn't have been very funny.
How often do you receive forwarded e-mail messages -- especially funny pieces with lots of graphics -- and find you must scroll down through half a dozen (more or less) forwarding addresses before you get to the real content? It's easy enough to scroll down, of course, but I personally find it annoying--I really don't need to know where this stuff originally came from or how many way-stations it has passed through.
The problem lies in one of the standard features of most e-mail programs: "reply" and "forward" click-options ordinarily will simply add your new "From" and "To" headers to the message that you have received. You can add your two bits to it or not, as you choose. So also, when you click on "reply" or "reply all", your e-mail software will reproduce the message to which you are responding, usually indicating more or less clearly by one or another device the earlier message(s) to which you are responding.
It not infrequently happens on B-Greek (and other lists) that a thread keeps on keeping on (sometimes long after everything really meaningful has already been said and objected to more than once). If you take the trouble to read through the whole message later in a thread, you will note that the entire thread is reproduced, sometimes more than once, in a response to a previous response. Although this may be a minor irritation, it doesn't concern an administrator unless or until a message posted to the list exceeds 50k, at which point our list-software asks a moderator to approve it or ask the perpetrators to trim away unnecessary back-history of the thread.
Might I suggest, please, that when you participate in an ongoing thread in this forum, you trim back the pre-history (the "archaeology") of the message to which you're responding so that it is easy to see exactly what you are answering -- and not all of what my father-in-law once called "the insulting stuff -- referring to all the items above and below the body of a (written) letter.
Is that too much to ask? It's not as if your were being asked to spell-check your messages (mis-spelling is surely an authorial privilege) or indicate the Sanskrit equivalent of the ancient Gothic word that you are discussing.
Please do not reply to this message on-list (alas, I have asked for too much!).
Carl W. Conrad
Co-Chair, B-Greek List
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