Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2010

Berkeley Brett filted:

You don't want this effect in your posts...to anyone reading them who isn't
coming through Google Groups, it's not clickable and makes you look like there's
something wrong with your computer....r

You don't create that effect: it is how Google chooses to show messages.  
When your post contains material quoted from others' prior postings,
Google condenses it that way, presumably by Googlecrat's concept of
"tidiness".

Mind, though I a bit sarky about it, it is true that a lot of posters
don't know how to, or don't bother to, trim quoted material down to only
what is needful to understand their comments.

Berkeley Brett skrev:

Just leave it to the readers program to display the quote as it
is set up to do.

You by your own willful action put in too much text? Why?

Hi Brett,

Berkeley Brett in
<57fa67a7-c70c-46f3-a305-33bd577de106@36g2000yqu.googlegroups.com>:

First of all, you are not at Google Groups here - you are using google
which is a web interface (and archive) for NNTP usenet groups (1).

Second, there is no indication that you are dumb - "newbie" is the correct
description ;->

As I can see from some of your recent postings, you are not in danger to
produce "- show quoted text -" because your quotations comply with common
usage:
- they are short
- they are preceded by ">" as a quotation mark

Sometimes you seem to omit quotations at all, and you don't use
introduction lines. Both of these are common, too, because they make it
easier for the majority of non-google readers to follow a wide-spread
discussion. These users will see the contributions similar to mails - one
by one, often accompanied with a thread of subject lines.

I'm afraid I don't know how to produce introductions with google though
- individual settings?

Just leave longer passages of quoted text in your postings. Alas, you don't
want to do this - believe me! <wg>

Ciao,

Paul

(1) See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol> for
details.

Of course, there are google groups, discussion fori which only exist on
google. Newsgroups, as usenet groups are often called, are independent
from google. They are hierarchically organized, both international and
national / lingual.

If you know how to eliminate that line, please tell other Google Groups
users how to delete it. It's a major irritant to those of us who use a
real newsreader instead of GG.

Ah, but perhaps you mean you don't know how to quote lines from the
posting that you're responding to. The basic rule is that you should
have a '>' character - and most people will add a space to that - in
front of every line you're quoting, as I have done above. Possibly you
can't see the '>'; I think that's one of the details that GG hides from
you. You should get the same effect, though, by clicking on the "show
quoted text" before replying. (And then you should delete the lines
you're not replying to.) Almost all newsreaders will insert the '>'
characters as needed. There is one especially buggy newsreader that
fails to insert them, but I think you're safe because GG is not a
Microsoft product.

As a general rule, you should only quote as much of the post you're
responding to as is needed. That is, just enough so that nobody has to
go back to an earlier message to figure out what you're talking about.
Delete everything else. (Note that I've deleted about half of what you
wrote, because the three lines above are a sufficient summary; nobody
needs to see your full text again, they need only a brief summary.) In
particular, those lines that GG stupidly inserts, saying "ignore quoted
text" and "show quoted text" should _never_ occur in a response. The
fact that they're included by default is a bug in GG.

You'll notice that some newsgroup participants quote too much, even to
the point of adding a one-line comment to a hundred lines of quoted
material. Very occasionally that's justified. Most of the time it's not,
so don't copy their style. The general rule is quite simple: if someone
else is doing something that irritates you, you shouldn't copy their
style. Excessive quoting is one of the major irritants. It's true that
GG reduces that irritation by hiding the quoted material, but most
newsreaders don't hide it. (To compensate, GG insists on including all
the stuff from junk mailers that most other news servers and news
readers delete. I don't know why GG doesn't allow junk filters, but as
far as I know it doesn't.)

For completeness, I'll add that you should always delete the signature
in what you're responding to. (Except in the very special and rare case
where you want to comment on the signature.) Most newsreaders do this
automatically. I can't remember whether GG does.

One minor detail: I see that your signature starts with a "--" line.
That's almost correct, but not quite. It should be a "-- " line. That
is, there should be a space character after the two minus signs. (Or
hyphens, if that's how you see them.) Some exceptionally buggy
newsreaders will delete the trailing space, but from memory I think this
is one of the rare things that Google Groups gets right.

Donna, if you're reading this then I believe that there should be an
extra FAQ entry directed towards those poor people who don't have a
newsreader and/or a news server and are forced to use Google Groups.
Proposed content: how to get a real newsreader, how to find a news
server, how to deal with that confusing "show quoted text", what to do
about signatures. In fact, perhaps there should be sections for all of
the popular news clients. I know that this is not newsgroup-specific,
but the fact is that most people don't know where to find general
newsreading advice - certainly, Google Groups is massively unhelpful -
so they'll probably look in the AUE FAQ before anything else. If
necessary, I could do a draft. It would have to be circulated to others,
because I don't know much about Windows software. (I use Windoze at
work, but there my expertise is confined to technical stuff like C
compilers, Subversion, Unix emulators, etc.) Still, I wouldn't mind
providing a skeleton that others could fill out.

PLEASE don't,

Jan

As Paul Schmitz-Josten says elsethread, you are not "at Google
Groups", you are using Google as a way to access Usenet.  What you
are reading is a news group, not a Google Group.

You might find that you would be happier using a real newsreader
program and getting your access directly through a news server. If
you want to do that, you could go to a suitable Windows news group
and ask for advice on selecting a news reader. That topic has
probably been beaten to death more than once on the Windows groups
-- I know it has on the Mac groups -- so you might search Google for
archived threads.

Or you could just download a copy of Mozilla Thunderbird and go to
it. I don't use either Windows or Thunderbird, but I'm sure there
are people on this news group who would be happy to help you get
started.

What are these "Google Groups" of which you speak?