7 ms·

Netiquette (1995)

96 points by heretoo 13y ago

tobyjsullivan 13y ago
I love that a lot of these are still completely applicable (the mail rules at least - haven't got to the rest). If it didn't violate half the rules, I'd email this to everyone I know. Perhaps I'll fax it instead...
frik 13y ago
Netiquette Guidelines (RFC1855, October 1995)
ekianjo 13y ago
Unless you are using an encryption device (hardware or software), you should assume that mail on the Internet is not secure. Never put in a mail message anything you would not put on a postcard. Still very much true.
- moconnor 13y ago
  Unfortunately this is miles away from how email has been marketed to (and is used by) the general public.
teddyh 13y ago
Link with proportional (non-fixed width) font: http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.html http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.html
- liotier 13y ago
  Heretic !
  - teddyh 13y ago
    Maybe this one is more to your liking? ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1855.txt;type=a
- GrinningFool 13y ago
  Fortunately for you, the RFC RFC neither prescribes nor proscribes any specific formatting - so you can keep your variable-width fonts if you must: http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3.txt http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3.txt
geddes 13y ago
One of the first items: - Never send chain letters via electronic mail. Chain letters are forbidden on the Internet. Your network privileges will be revoked. Notify your local system administrator if your ever receive one. I think when I got on the internet around 1996 half of the e-mails I got were chain letters. Proves the fallacy of trying to claim that something is 'forbidden on the internet.'
- simoncion 13y ago
  It might have written with tongue firmly in cheek. :)
  - username42 13y ago
    No, it was written before "eternal september" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
    - RyanMcGreal 13y ago
      Eternal September was in 1993, and the RFC 1855 was written in 1995. It is specifically a response to Eternal September: "Today, the community of Internet users includes people who are new to the environment. These 'Newbies' are unfamiliar with the culture and don't need to know about transport and protocols. In order to bring these new users into the Internet culture quickly, this Guide offers a minimum set of behaviors which organizations and individuals may take and adapt for their own use."
      - username42 13y ago
        I have learned the netiqette rules in 1990 when I learned about internet. The RFC has gathered rules that were created before.
        username42 13y ago
        2 points lost for giving insight and fixing mistakes. Thank you.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
etfb 13y ago
To the tune of Tomorrow Belongs To Me from Cabaret: *This Subnet Belongs To Me* The ‘Net is a creature of patches and parts, As free as the hawk on the breeze, With billions of voices and hands and hearts, Ruled only by RFCs. O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5, Your paragraphs murmer to me! No protocol yet keeps the ‘Net alive As well as this RFC. When mailing, recall that the ‘Net’s not secure; Let copyright laws be your guide; Ignore any chains; let your quotes stay pure; Flame not; use a sig; don’t chide. Check every address; mark your messages “long”; Use smileys and caps sparingly; Don’t send an attachment; kneejerks are wrong; So speaketh this RFC. O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5, Your sections are wise as can be! A luser or guru will surely thrive By trusting this RFC. When chatting, be patient and always assume That talk is as cheap as the dirt; When posting to news, don’t send spam, or Boom! Some hax0r will make you hurt! The guidlines exist both for wisemen and fools, They’re meant to be read carefully; For can you imagine what chaos rules Without such an RFC? O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5, Our last and best hope, patently The ‘Net is a queen-less and smoke-filled hive Without such a thing Without such a thing Without such an RFC!
- INTPenis 13y ago
  Here's one for xmas, RFC 968. Twas the night before start-up and all through the net, not a packet was moving; no bit nor octet. The engineers rattled their cards in despair, hoping a bad chip would blow with a flare. The salesmen were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of data nets danced in their heads. And I with my datascope tracings and dumps prepared for some pretty bad bruises and lumps. When out in the hall there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter. There stood at the threshold with PC in tow, An ARPANET hacker, all ready to go. I could see from the creases that covered his brow, he'd conquer the crisis confronting him now. More rapid than eagles, he checked each alarm and scrutinized each for its potential harm. On LAPB, on OSI, X.25! TCP, SNA, V.35! His eyes were afire with the strength of his gaze; no bug could hide long; not for hours or days. A wink of his eye and a twitch of his head, soon gave me to know I had little to dread. He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, fixing a net that had gone plumb berserk; And laying a finger on one suspect line, he entered a patch and the net came up fine! The packets flowed neatly and protocols matched; the hosts interfaced and shift-registers latched. He tested the system from Gateway to PAD; not one bit was dropped; no checksum was bad. At last he was finished and wearily sighed and turned to explain why the system had died. I twisted my fingers and counted to ten; an off-by-one index had done it again...
INTPenis 13y ago
As a curious teenager in the late 90s I once started discovering nmap and subnet masks by scanning everything in my own subnet from my home Telia connection that was in my mothers name. Shortly after a thick envelope came in the mail and I was very fortunate to catch it before my mother because in it was a stern warning from someone at Telia to stop scanning their equipment and several printed pages of this document on netiquette. I didn't read it all so I can't be sure it was that exact Rfc, and I'm pretty sure it was in Swedish, but the sheer volume of pages makes me think it was either this rfc translated or something very similar that Telia kept on hand. Either way, I never shat where I slept again and I read a lot about stealth scanning techniques and proxying after that. ☺
mattlutze 13y ago
Wait overnight to send emotional responses to messages. If you have really strong feelings about a subject, indicate it via FLAME ON/OFF enclosures. For example: FLAME ON: This type of argument is not worth the bandwidth it takes to send it. It's illogical and poorly reasoned. The rest of the world agrees with me. FLAME OFF This doc is full of gems. Trolls and flame-bait? Just invoke your best Johnny Flame impression. I really think that if more people took time every day to scour the annals of IETF RFC history, they'd find answers to many of the "new" problems we discover every few years.
- mattlutze 13y ago
  Remember that talk is an interruption to the other person. Only use as appropriate. And never talk to strangers. Thanks Mom.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    A lot of people are too young to have ever experienced what it was like to use unix systems with lots of concurrent users "back in the day". Back then there were a lot of different ways to communicate with other folks on the same system, although many of them have modern analogues. "talk" was a primitive IM system that could be used to communicate between two people logged into shell (tty) accounts on a unix system. When initiating a talk connection it would pop up a prompt on the other user's terminal, which is why it's mentioned as being an interruption. It would interrupt someone else's workflow quite abruptly. "write" was even more primitive, it was a way to directly send text to someone else's terminal. Back then the community of users was small, not truly anonymous, and there were strong external authorities that helped prevent abuses (most net users were students or academics, abusing systems could get you kicked out of school or fired). As the internet became more widespread a lot of these features were locked down and turned off on most systems.
  - vog 13y ago
    This is only funny when torn out of context. Note that this is about the Unix command "talk" (a primitive chat shown directly the recipient's shell). This is not about aktually talking to people. The phrase "never talk to strangers" is just a mnemonic.
simonmales 13y ago
If I was to employ someone, I would make them sign a copy of the Netiquette RFC before they started.
gabemart 13y ago
One netiquette question I've wondered about in the past: when emailing an extremely busy person to ask for something, if they send you a message letting you know they've done what you ask, is it better to reply, thanking them (thus giving them yet another email to process) or thank them in advance in your original message?
- avar 13y ago
  Thinking people in advance when you're asking them and not expecting them to do something always struck me as a bit rude. It gives off the implicit expectation that they're going to do as you ask, and you might as well thank them in advance since them agreeing to do what you're asking is just a formality. Personally I just express how much they'd be helping me if they did what I'm asking and how much I'd appreciate it instead.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    Why is thanking in advance not an expression of professional confidence in the person you are emailing? And there for a huge compliment?
- ColinWright 13y ago
  Thanking in advance is either rude, because you're expecting them to do something, or different, because you're thanking them for taking the time to read the email and consider the request. If I do something for someone and then never hear from them again, I would be somewhere on the scale from disappointed to annoyed. A one line genuine expression of thanks takes very little time for the recipient. Composing it and getting it right can be difficult and time-consuming, but is, to my mind, always the right thing to do. Make it brief, make it genuine.
- vog 13y ago
  I often do both. I thank them in advance, to make clear that they'd be doing me a great favor if they reply. Afterwards, I thank them for having taken that time.
- joshuacc 13y ago
ColinWright 13y ago
Be brief without being overly terse. When replying to a message, include enough original material to be understood but no more. It is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material. This is made literally impossible by some email clients and some webmail systems. Some interfaces insist on only allow "top-posting" replies, putting your new text at the top, and quoting the previous email in its entirety. It drives me nuts. I always quote the portion to which I'm replying, and add my reply below that, and recently a reply came back saying - "I like the way you reply, I'm going to reply in the same style!" Now I can quote an RFC.
- lmm 13y ago
  I think this became recommended practice in the days when usenet and email delivery was unreliable, bandwidth was expensive, and clients didn't have threaded interfaces or fold quoted sections. It's since been slavishly enforced on newcomers by groups that often have no idea of the original reasons for these protocols and why some may be no longer relevant. Obviously sometimes it's most efficient to quote and interleave, when you want to reply to several points in a way that would be confusing without it. But with modern systems it's also fine to write a reply that doesn't make sense without the message it's in reply to, or a reply that quotes the whole message.
  - e12e 13y ago
    I've always read the advice as advice for readability. It's just text -- even in ancient times the bandwidth savings were not huge -- text does compress rather well. [edit: This entire discussion is now at roughly 7K, or 3351 bytes after gzip (this is copy pasted, not the html) -- that's 89 seconds at 300 baud if I do the math correctly. By comparison, my original reply was 166 bytes and compressed to 146 -- so would download in a fraction of a second. But note how poor the compression ratio is. Still doubt this was born out of a quest to save bandwidth (as most(?) were batch up/downloading discussion-lists at the time. And 300 baud is roughly typing speed -- that's a long time ago.]
    - 13y ago
StevePerkins 13y ago
I had the dubious honor of starting undergrad, and being introduced to the Internet, during the actual Eternal September (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September). As much as I've always been irked by some items in this document (e.g. all-caps, chain letters, etc)... I definitely do not miss the days when half of all discussion in any given forum was meta-babble about how to properly post in the forum. I swear, back in the mid-90's it felt like every single Usenet thread devolved into a shouting match between "bottom posters" and "top posters"! Plonk! This may be blasphemy, but even at that time I always believed that the tools would have to evolve to fit human nature rather than the other way around. Why not just improve your Usenet readers (even the shell-based ones) to minimize quoted text regardless of where it's found? You know, like every single email client does today without us thinking anything of it? Such basic usability features were slow to appear... not because it's all that technically challenging, but rather due to cultural resistance and purity dogma. Nonsense. If any system of human interaction requires a high degree of deliberate and manual cooperation, then it's not tenable and can be improved by technology.
- e12e 13y ago
  > Why not just improve your Usenet readers (even the shell-based ones) to minimize quoted text regardless of where it's found? You know, like every single email client does today without us thinking anything of it? Do they now? As far as I've managed to figure out, gmail has a broken conversation view that only works half the time, and then there's sup -- any other email clients that do a good enough job of threading quoted conversations? I agree in principle -- fix the software -- but that implies fixing the protocol first -- and we haven't done that yet. XMPP does a little something to help (for conversations) -- but isn't a suitable solution for email-like functionality. I'd love to be wrong -- but I've yet to use any email client that has decent "smart" threading of conversations (I don't use sup -- as of yet anyway).
- scelerat 13y ago
  > Plonk! Ahh, the sweet, sweet sound of a Usenet troll landing in your killfile.
zdw 13y ago
Middle of page 7: If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers understand when they start to read your response. Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context helps everyone. But do not include the entire original! Thus, bottom posting is correct, full-quote top posting is an abomination. Anyone who argues otherwise is breaking the rules.
- buugs 13y ago
  This is almost 20 years old technology has changed a lot since then. Email clients hide quotes by default and also quote by default. People don't treat email the same (who has the time to summarize/edit the quote anymore). Gmail has made top posting the default which means most users will top quote. Threading is a bit better. Feel free to continue bottom posting but remember not to quote the whole damn thing and remember to keep the quote short enough that I hopefully don't have to scroll down to see what you added. I personally find top posting easier to follow with modern threading.
  - e12e 13y ago
    > Email clients hide quotes by default and also quote by default. Which clients? > Gmail has made top posting the default which means most users will top > quote. Outlook already did this. At least with Outlook, the UI is broken, so people understand what you mean when you complain. Gmail being smart, people have a hard time grasping what you mean when you try to get them to quote "smart". And both approaches are wrong (IMNHO). > Feel free to continue bottom posting but remember not to quote the > whole damn thing and remember to keep the quote short enough that I > hopefully don't have to scroll down to see what you added. I > personally find top posting easier to follow with modern threading. Why would you have to scroll when "[e]mail clients hide quotes by default" ? Anyway, lets not continue this into a flame war about top/bottom/proper quoting -- but I'm genuinely confused about your points above (they seem to contradict each other?). I really need to play a bit with sup -- I hear they did a lot of things right. For what it's worth, I think threading with quoting/conversations is still an unsolved problem (and I'm not just talking corner-cases and presence/absence of word wrap etc -- just what is the best way to present a conversation that a) makes conversation flow easily, and with readily available (correct amounts) of context while it is active, and b) reads like a reasonable transcript/conversation without too much redundancy for someone seeing the thread after the conversation has started. So far I think manually quoted replies, with bottom posting is by far the best). > who has the time to summarize/edit the quote anymore Most people on high-quality discussion lists? I think this goes more towards a "what is email as a medium"-type thing. Sometimes a quick reply is fine -- but if you are writing more than a paragraph, it is probably worth the time to put some effort into it (ironically, actively counteracted by things like hn's simple text-input field -- unless you invoke a proper editor, for example using the "It's all text!"-firefox extension, or ctrl-i for external editor with vimperator). I think it's more that people don't really compose emails anymore -- they don't invoke a proper editor (whatever that may be for the user in question -- but something that at least allows a minimum of easy copy/cut/paste -- I would say vim/emacs, some might want something a little more modern). But when you're given an augmented text-field (the so-called rich web editors) -- ofcourse you won't be writing much. It's a horrible writing/editing experience.
gwu78 13y ago
"Talk is a set of protocols that allow two people to have an interactive dialogue via a computer." I remember the first time I used talk. I think it is what got me hooked on UNIX.
mathattack 13y ago
Amazing that a lot of this has stood up to the test of time. A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we call these "flames") even if you are provoked. On the other hand, you shouldn't be surprised if you get flamed and it's prudent not to respond to flames.

Netiquette (1995)

96 points by heretoo 13y ago

I love that a lot of these are still completely applicable (the mail rules at least - haven't got to the rest). If it didn't violate half the rules, I'd email this to everyone I know. Perhaps I'll fax it instead...

frik 13y ago

Netiquette Guidelines (RFC1855, October 1995)

ekianjo 13y ago

Unless you are using an encryption device (hardware or software), you should assume that mail on the Internet is not secure. Never put in a mail message anything you would not put on a postcard. Still very much true.

moconnor 13y ago
Unfortunately this is miles away from how email has been marketed to (and is used by) the general public.

teddyh 13y ago

Link with proportional (non-fixed width) font: http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.html http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.html

liotier 13y ago
Heretic !
- teddyh 13y ago
  Maybe this one is more to your liking? ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1855.txt;type=a
GrinningFool 13y ago
Fortunately for you, the RFC RFC neither prescribes nor proscribes any specific formatting - so you can keep your variable-width fonts if you must: http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3.txt http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3.txt

geddes 13y ago

One of the first items: - Never send chain letters via electronic mail. Chain letters are forbidden on the Internet. Your network privileges will be revoked. Notify your local system administrator if your ever receive one. I think when I got on the internet around 1996 half of the e-mails I got were chain letters. Proves the fallacy of trying to claim that something is 'forbidden on the internet.'

simoncion 13y ago
It might have written with tongue firmly in cheek. :)
- username42 13y ago
  No, it was written before "eternal september" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
  - RyanMcGreal 13y ago
    Eternal September was in 1993, and the RFC 1855 was written in 1995. It is specifically a response to Eternal September: "Today, the community of Internet users includes people who are new to the environment. These 'Newbies' are unfamiliar with the culture and don't need to know about transport and protocols. In order to bring these new users into the Internet culture quickly, this Guide offers a minimum set of behaviors which organizations and individuals may take and adapt for their own use."
    - username42 13y ago
      I have learned the netiqette rules in 1990 when I learned about internet. The RFC has gathered rules that were created before.
      - username42 13y ago
        2 points lost for giving insight and fixing mistakes. Thank you.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

etfb 13y ago

To the tune of Tomorrow Belongs To Me from Cabaret: *This Subnet Belongs To Me* The ‘Net is a creature of patches and parts, As free as the hawk on the breeze, With billions of voices and hands and hearts, Ruled only by RFCs. O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5, Your paragraphs murmer to me! No protocol yet keeps the ‘Net alive As well as this RFC. When mailing, recall that the ‘Net’s not secure; Let copyright laws be your guide; Ignore any chains; let your quotes stay pure; Flame not; use a sig; don’t chide. Check every address; mark your messages “long”; Use smileys and caps sparingly; Don’t send an attachment; kneejerks are wrong; So speaketh this RFC. O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5, Your sections are wise as can be! A luser or guru will surely thrive By trusting this RFC. When chatting, be patient and always assume That talk is as cheap as the dirt; When posting to news, don’t send spam, or Boom! Some hax0r will make you hurt! The guidlines exist both for wisemen and fools, They’re meant to be read carefully; For can you imagine what chaos rules Without such an RFC? O, Internet RFC 1-8-5-5, Our last and best hope, patently The ‘Net is a queen-less and smoke-filled hive Without such a thing Without such a thing Without such an RFC!

INTPenis 13y ago
Here's one for xmas, RFC 968. Twas the night before start-up and all through the net, not a packet was moving; no bit nor octet. The engineers rattled their cards in despair, hoping a bad chip would blow with a flare. The salesmen were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of data nets danced in their heads. And I with my datascope tracings and dumps prepared for some pretty bad bruises and lumps. When out in the hall there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter. There stood at the threshold with PC in tow, An ARPANET hacker, all ready to go. I could see from the creases that covered his brow, he'd conquer the crisis confronting him now. More rapid than eagles, he checked each alarm and scrutinized each for its potential harm. On LAPB, on OSI, X.25! TCP, SNA, V.35! His eyes were afire with the strength of his gaze; no bug could hide long; not for hours or days. A wink of his eye and a twitch of his head, soon gave me to know I had little to dread. He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, fixing a net that had gone plumb berserk; And laying a finger on one suspect line, he entered a patch and the net came up fine! The packets flowed neatly and protocols matched; the hosts interfaced and shift-registers latched. He tested the system from Gateway to PAD; not one bit was dropped; no checksum was bad. At last he was finished and wearily sighed and turned to explain why the system had died. I twisted my fingers and counted to ten; an off-by-one index had done it again...

INTPenis 13y ago

As a curious teenager in the late 90s I once started discovering nmap and subnet masks by scanning everything in my own subnet from my home Telia connection that was in my mothers name. Shortly after a thick envelope came in the mail and I was very fortunate to catch it before my mother because in it was a stern warning from someone at Telia to stop scanning their equipment and several printed pages of this document on netiquette. I didn't read it all so I can't be sure it was that exact Rfc, and I'm pretty sure it was in Swedish, but the sheer volume of pages makes me think it was either this rfc translated or something very similar that Telia kept on hand. Either way, I never shat where I slept again and I read a lot about stealth scanning techniques and proxying after that. ☺

mattlutze 13y ago

Wait overnight to send emotional responses to messages. If you have really strong feelings about a subject, indicate it via FLAME ON/OFF enclosures. For example: FLAME ON: This type of argument is not worth the bandwidth it takes to send it. It's illogical and poorly reasoned. The rest of the world agrees with me. FLAME OFF This doc is full of gems. Trolls and flame-bait? Just invoke your best Johnny Flame impression. I really think that if more people took time every day to scour the annals of IETF RFC history, they'd find answers to many of the "new" problems we discover every few years.

mattlutze 13y ago
Remember that talk is an interruption to the other person. Only use as appropriate. And never talk to strangers. Thanks Mom.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  A lot of people are too young to have ever experienced what it was like to use unix systems with lots of concurrent users "back in the day". Back then there were a lot of different ways to communicate with other folks on the same system, although many of them have modern analogues. "talk" was a primitive IM system that could be used to communicate between two people logged into shell (tty) accounts on a unix system. When initiating a talk connection it would pop up a prompt on the other user's terminal, which is why it's mentioned as being an interruption. It would interrupt someone else's workflow quite abruptly. "write" was even more primitive, it was a way to directly send text to someone else's terminal. Back then the community of users was small, not truly anonymous, and there were strong external authorities that helped prevent abuses (most net users were students or academics, abusing systems could get you kicked out of school or fired). As the internet became more widespread a lot of these features were locked down and turned off on most systems.
- vog 13y ago
  This is only funny when torn out of context. Note that this is about the Unix command "talk" (a primitive chat shown directly the recipient's shell). This is not about aktually talking to people. The phrase "never talk to strangers" is just a mnemonic.

simonmales 13y ago

If I was to employ someone, I would make them sign a copy of the Netiquette RFC before they started.

gabemart 13y ago

One netiquette question I've wondered about in the past: when emailing an extremely busy person to ask for something, if they send you a message letting you know they've done what you ask, is it better to reply, thanking them (thus giving them yet another email to process) or thank them in advance in your original message?

avar 13y ago
Thinking people in advance when you're asking them and not expecting them to do something always struck me as a bit rude. It gives off the implicit expectation that they're going to do as you ask, and you might as well thank them in advance since them agreeing to do what you're asking is just a formality. Personally I just express how much they'd be helping me if they did what I'm asking and how much I'd appreciate it instead.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Why is thanking in advance not an expression of professional confidence in the person you are emailing? And there for a huge compliment?
ColinWright 13y ago
Thanking in advance is either rude, because you're expecting them to do something, or different, because you're thanking them for taking the time to read the email and consider the request. If I do something for someone and then never hear from them again, I would be somewhere on the scale from disappointed to annoyed. A one line genuine expression of thanks takes very little time for the recipient. Composing it and getting it right can be difficult and time-consuming, but is, to my mind, always the right thing to do. Make it brief, make it genuine.
vog 13y ago
I often do both. I thank them in advance, to make clear that they'd be doing me a great favor if they reply. Afterwards, I thank them for having taken that time.
joshuacc 13y ago

ColinWright 13y ago

Be brief without being overly terse. When replying to a message, include enough original material to be understood but no more. It is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material. This is made literally impossible by some email clients and some webmail systems. Some interfaces insist on only allow "top-posting" replies, putting your new text at the top, and quoting the previous email in its entirety. It drives me nuts. I always quote the portion to which I'm replying, and add my reply below that, and recently a reply came back saying - "I like the way you reply, I'm going to reply in the same style!" Now I can quote an RFC.

lmm 13y ago
I think this became recommended practice in the days when usenet and email delivery was unreliable, bandwidth was expensive, and clients didn't have threaded interfaces or fold quoted sections. It's since been slavishly enforced on newcomers by groups that often have no idea of the original reasons for these protocols and why some may be no longer relevant. Obviously sometimes it's most efficient to quote and interleave, when you want to reply to several points in a way that would be confusing without it. But with modern systems it's also fine to write a reply that doesn't make sense without the message it's in reply to, or a reply that quotes the whole message.
- e12e 13y ago
  I've always read the advice as advice for readability. It's just text -- even in ancient times the bandwidth savings were not huge -- text does compress rather well. [edit: This entire discussion is now at roughly 7K, or 3351 bytes after gzip (this is copy pasted, not the html) -- that's 89 seconds at 300 baud if I do the math correctly. By comparison, my original reply was 166 bytes and compressed to 146 -- so would download in a fraction of a second. But note how poor the compression ratio is. Still doubt this was born out of a quest to save bandwidth (as most(?) were batch up/downloading discussion-lists at the time. And 300 baud is roughly typing speed -- that's a long time ago.]
  - 13y ago

StevePerkins 13y ago

I had the dubious honor of starting undergrad, and being introduced to the Internet, during the actual Eternal September (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September). As much as I've always been irked by some items in this document (e.g. all-caps, chain letters, etc)... I definitely do not miss the days when half of all discussion in any given forum was meta-babble about how to properly post in the forum. I swear, back in the mid-90's it felt like every single Usenet thread devolved into a shouting match between "bottom posters" and "top posters"! Plonk! This may be blasphemy, but even at that time I always believed that the tools would have to evolve to fit human nature rather than the other way around. Why not just improve your Usenet readers (even the shell-based ones) to minimize quoted text regardless of where it's found? You know, like every single email client does today without us thinking anything of it? Such basic usability features were slow to appear... not because it's all that technically challenging, but rather due to cultural resistance and purity dogma. Nonsense. If any system of human interaction requires a high degree of deliberate and manual cooperation, then it's not tenable and can be improved by technology.

e12e 13y ago
> Why not just improve your Usenet readers (even the shell-based ones) to minimize quoted text regardless of where it's found? You know, like every single email client does today without us thinking anything of it? Do they now? As far as I've managed to figure out, gmail has a broken conversation view that only works half the time, and then there's sup -- any other email clients that do a good enough job of threading quoted conversations? I agree in principle -- fix the software -- but that implies fixing the protocol first -- and we haven't done that yet. XMPP does a little something to help (for conversations) -- but isn't a suitable solution for email-like functionality. I'd love to be wrong -- but I've yet to use any email client that has decent "smart" threading of conversations (I don't use sup -- as of yet anyway).
scelerat 13y ago
> Plonk! Ahh, the sweet, sweet sound of a Usenet troll landing in your killfile.

zdw 13y ago

Middle of page 7: If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers understand when they start to read your response. Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context helps everyone. But do not include the entire original! Thus, bottom posting is correct, full-quote top posting is an abomination. Anyone who argues otherwise is breaking the rules.

buugs 13y ago
This is almost 20 years old technology has changed a lot since then. Email clients hide quotes by default and also quote by default. People don't treat email the same (who has the time to summarize/edit the quote anymore). Gmail has made top posting the default which means most users will top quote. Threading is a bit better. Feel free to continue bottom posting but remember not to quote the whole damn thing and remember to keep the quote short enough that I hopefully don't have to scroll down to see what you added. I personally find top posting easier to follow with modern threading.
- e12e 13y ago
  > Email clients hide quotes by default and also quote by default. Which clients? > Gmail has made top posting the default which means most users will top > quote. Outlook already did this. At least with Outlook, the UI is broken, so people understand what you mean when you complain. Gmail being smart, people have a hard time grasping what you mean when you try to get them to quote "smart". And both approaches are wrong (IMNHO). > Feel free to continue bottom posting but remember not to quote the > whole damn thing and remember to keep the quote short enough that I > hopefully don't have to scroll down to see what you added. I > personally find top posting easier to follow with modern threading. Why would you have to scroll when "[e]mail clients hide quotes by default" ? Anyway, lets not continue this into a flame war about top/bottom/proper quoting -- but I'm genuinely confused about your points above (they seem to contradict each other?). I really need to play a bit with sup -- I hear they did a lot of things right. For what it's worth, I think threading with quoting/conversations is still an unsolved problem (and I'm not just talking corner-cases and presence/absence of word wrap etc -- just what is the best way to present a conversation that a) makes conversation flow easily, and with readily available (correct amounts) of context while it is active, and b) reads like a reasonable transcript/conversation without too much redundancy for someone seeing the thread after the conversation has started. So far I think manually quoted replies, with bottom posting is by far the best). > who has the time to summarize/edit the quote anymore Most people on high-quality discussion lists? I think this goes more towards a "what is email as a medium"-type thing. Sometimes a quick reply is fine -- but if you are writing more than a paragraph, it is probably worth the time to put some effort into it (ironically, actively counteracted by things like hn's simple text-input field -- unless you invoke a proper editor, for example using the "It's all text!"-firefox extension, or ctrl-i for external editor with vimperator). I think it's more that people don't really compose emails anymore -- they don't invoke a proper editor (whatever that may be for the user in question -- but something that at least allows a minimum of easy copy/cut/paste -- I would say vim/emacs, some might want something a little more modern). But when you're given an augmented text-field (the so-called rich web editors) -- ofcourse you won't be writing much. It's a horrible writing/editing experience.

gwu78 13y ago

"Talk is a set of protocols that allow two people to have an interactive dialogue via a computer." I remember the first time I used talk. I think it is what got me hooked on UNIX.

mathattack 13y ago

Amazing that a lot of this has stood up to the test of time. A good rule of thumb: Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive. You should not send heated messages (we call these "flames") even if you are provoked. On the other hand, you shouldn't be surprised if you get flamed and it's prudent not to respond to flames.