Message 7040 : A personal guide to posting msg's (Maedhros)
Written on Wed May  3 10:01:52 1995

After reading the last days post on this board, I am starting to wilt. Now,
I would rather have a lot of msg's than very few. Anyway, when some of these
posts regularly have page breaks at 30% you do not pay so much attention.
This is what I recommend:

1. Try and structure your post. This means that you should be using paragraphs.
   When I say paragraphs, I do not mean 20 lines of unbroken text, with line
   indentations. I mean EMPTY lines between text.

2. Try and keep line length to between 65 and 78 characters (the nearer to 78
   the better). This has the pychological effect of making your post seem
   shorter than it is.

3. If you can, you bullets (o) or hyphens (-) to mark the beginning of an item.
   Or you may use numbers (like this post)

4. Referring to previous posts: I personally think these should be kept to a
   minimum. Kienna has been pretty guilty of adding the post header of the post
   that is being referred to just under the current header. When your screen
   scrolls past, you tend to think that this 2nd header is the header for the
   current post.

5. Referring to previous posts II: It is nice when people add a few lines from
   a previous post so that we can see what the current argument is about.
   However, when the entire posts consists of this (RE: Kienna) then we have a
   problem. I would urge people not to adopt a USENET-style flame-war approach
   where previous threads are hauled out and given a dissection word by word.
   Ainur forbid, that we will see

>> >>blah blah

>> Well I tend to disaggree with this           THIS IS

Someone wrote above...                          BAD BAD BAD!!!!

>> more disagreement

>> >> blah blah...


6. Summaries: These are a useful way of ending a post. I am as guilty as others
   when I don't post an end-summare post is more than 2-3 pages and
   you want people finishing the post to know where the hell you were going
   with the post: write a summary!

7. Read your post after posting. I still get annoyed when I see words turned
   into gibberish strings by their client. If necessary repost, and delete last
   msg. Better still, post the msg without the aid of your client (unless it is
   cancan, of course).

SUMMARY: I would like to see an improvement in the level of postings. The worst
         msg, is one which no-one ever reads, and/or ignores. If you don't want
         your time on the game wasted as you post, try and take into
         consideration some of the issues I have written about.

-Maedhros

ps. any dissections of this post will be ignored.