It's just too usual that when people reply to an article, they just answer
at the beginning of the article and leave the whole quoted previous article
untouched after that, no matter how long it is. If it's 10 Megs long, it
doesn't matter, they just leave it there.

  There's only inconvenience when people do this.
  The quote in itself is completely useless. If someone wants to read the
whole previous article, he can go back in the thread to read it. There's
no need to quote a whole article if it's already there in the thread.
  If you are responding to something specific said in a long article,
people may not know what you are talking about because they don't know which
part of the article you are responding to.
  Moreover, an useless quote makes the article larger. It's not unusual
that the response is about 2 lines long and the quote is 200 lines long,
making the article more than 100 times larger than necessary.
  This of course wastes valuable server space and makes downloading the
article slower (some people have to pay for every minute they spend on
the net).

  When you are responding to an article, please follow these rules. By
quoting correctly you will help everyone. You will make your articles
clearer to read, better structured and you will save server space and
bandwidth.

  - If you are responding to the whole article, to the whole idea in it,
    not just something specific inside it, then don't quote anything
    (unless the article is very short, like few lines).
    If your newsreader always automatically quotes the whole original
    article, then just delete the quote.
    If the original article is very short (few lines), then you may want to
    quote it. However, you should write your answer AFTER the quote, not
    before. It's easier to see what are you responding to when it's first
    in the article.

  - If you want to respond to something specific said in the original article,
    then quote just that part. If there's more than one thing you want to
    respond to, quote only those parts and remove everything else.
    Don't delete just extra lines; you can also trim the quoted lines
    themselves to delete obsolete parts (like the ending of the previous
    phrase or the beginning of the next).
    Just make sure that you don't modify the meaning of the original phrase
    (that would be very impolite).

  - Write your answer AFTER the quote, not at the beginning of the article.
    If there are several quotes, write the proper answer after each quote.
    Your response could have approximately this format:


Xyz wrote in article 123:
> This is a quote from the original article.

  This is a response to that allegation.

> This is another quote from the original article.

  And this is a response to this one.


    This way your article will be a lot clearer. It is easy to see what
    you are responding to and it's easier to understand what you are
    talking about. If you had written your response at the beginning of
    the article, it would be a lot harder to see what are you responding to.

  - If you want to say something general about the whole original article
    and then respond to specific parts of it, you can write this general
    thing at the beginning of your article and then respond to the quotes
    as described above.

  Thanks.


  (Disclaimer: This represents my personal opinion and I'm not writing in
the name of the TAG group or the server admins.)

-- 
main(i,_){for(_?--i,main(i+2,"FhhQHFIJD|FQTITFN]zRFHhhTBFHhhTBFysdB"[i]
):_;i&&_>1;printf("%s",_-70?_&1?"[]":" ":(_=0,"\n")),_/=2);} /*- Warp -*/

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