How To Followup A Post On Netnews Properly

[internet index]

  1. Press the key that does a followup - often, this is 'f'.

  2. The message will now appear in a text editor window.

  3. Take note of the points you wish to reply to in this article.

  4. Place your text cursor in between the lines of these points, & then type your responses interspersed with your quoted text. Make sure your typing starts at the beginning of the line, & not after the quoting character (which is commonly a '>').

  5. For clarity, insert a blank line seperating your responses from the quoted text.

  6. Read through the total amount of text, & delete the parts of that text which are not necessary in order to preserve the context of your response. If you find that you are only able to delete a small part of the previous post, consider deleting most of it & including a 1 or 2 line summary, enclosed with [square] brackets. Many people reading news will skip over to the next article in the thread if they do not see any right-formatted new material within the first screenful.

    To delete the irrelevant material, you may use either the 'delete', or the 'backspace' keys on your keyboard. If you are an advanced user, you may select whole blocks of text using your mouse (& the relevant button on your mouse) & delete them in bulk. Consult the help file of your operating system for further details on this.

  7. Read through the remaining total amount of text, & consider the possibility that you may be able to repeat step 6 again.

  8. The last thing in your article should be the signature, unless one is inserted automatically by your news posting software. It should be separated from the body of the article by a line consisting of two hyphens and a space ('-- ') (in that order) and nothing else. Do not put the signature at the start of your article; this looks silly and confuses some newsreading software. Your signature should be short and informational; it is not the place for an ASCII-art rendering of your cat, nor for a detailed explanation (including quotes from your favourite constitution & a variety of US senators) of why you think there should be no restrictions on gun ownership.

  9. Each line of text in your article should be at most about 70 characters long, and certainly no more than 80 characters. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, most people read news on screens, or in windows, 80 characters wide; long lines often get `wrapped' in a way that makes them unsightly and difficult to read. Secondly, even if the long lines do fit on the reader's screen, they will probably still be hard to read (This is one reason why text in newspapers is laid out in columns: it's much easier to read that way than it would be if the text ran right across the page). If you find that the wordwrapping function of your newsreader does not work properly, consider making use of the `enter' key at the end of each line.

  10. You should not be posting html to netnews - if you think you might be (& are using netscape to read news), do Edit -> Preferences -> Mail&Groups -> Messages and make sure both the html is set to `off' and the autowrap is at 72.

  11. Finally, before pressing `send', look at the Newsgroups line. Consider if your post is really appropriate to all of the newsgroups you are about to post to, & consider whether or not you should be removing a few.

  12. If you follow these guidelines well, you will look like a real h3pc4t d00d in front of your peers on netnews, & will soon be allowed to ride in the black helicopter of the cabal (which, of course, does not exist). If you persistently fail to follow these guidelines by persistently failing to trim quoted material in followups, you will risk being considered to be a l4m3r & a l00z3r, which is not very nice.

  13. You may think I am being excessively picky, anally retentive, & complaintful for bringing this forward; this is not so - despite being an anarchic system, the internet has worked for nearly 30 years because the overwhelming majority of its users have co-operated in following certain guidelines in how they use it, with gentle (& not so gentle !) pressure upon those who don't to pursuade them of the Error Of Their Ways. Deviating wildly from these commonly agreed guidelines only serves to make things difficult for every body else.

  14. This has been a Patronising Public Service Announcement, sponsored by Me. Thank you for reading.