Forum FAQ - Replying

The skill of participating appropriately in a public discussion group depends not only on what you say, but also how you say it. The rules for laying out replies on the Forum are listed below and are enforced for the benefit of all members: please ensure you have read and understood the whole of this page before attempting to join in a discussion.

You may be used to different customs elsewhere - in particular, some workplaces may, in their internal IT policies, positively encourage you to top-post and to keep the entirety of the thread intact on every message. However, it is only polite to keep to local customs (remember those HSBC adverts about the importance of local knowledge to make people feel comfortable?).

Please take care to follow all the rules below every time you post to the Forum. Once you get used to them, you will find they do not significantly slow down your composition of an email. Even if you are in a hurry, it is just rude to ignore the rules, even once. If you persistently break the rules you may have your ability to send messages to the Forum revoked, although you will still be able to receive messages.

Edit your replies ("snip")

Correct editing of replies boils down to two basic principles:

Ensure there is enough context to make sense of your reply.
Ensure there is not too much context, which would make your email too large and swamp your reply.

Please remember to delete everything from the original message which isn't absolutely essential to make sense of your reply - this is known as "snipping".

When a "thread" (that's computer-speak for a particular topic of conversation) has many messages in a short time, nobody needs to receive 50 copies of the first message, 49 of the second, and so on! This will especially irritate anybody receiving a digest. People who want to read the whole original message can look back through their own mailbox, or fetch it from the archive - it doesn't have to be included in each reply too.

As a rule of thumb, if there are more lines of the original than there are of your reply, then you haven't cut out enough.

Some popular programs will include a complete header block like this at the top of the included message:

-----Original Message-----
From: A N Other <email.address@example.com>
Sent: 25 December 2004
To: forum@greenbelt-forum.org.uk
Subject: Happy Christmas

Please replace the whole of any block like this with a one-line attribution along the lines of:

A N Other said:

Corporate disclaimers and "signature" blocks are also just a waste of space and must be deleted. Of course, if possible you should avoid adding any disclaimers of your own, and keep your signature to a maximum of four lines.

Quote properly (don't "Top Post")

The way that the most common email programs work, stuffing the whole of the previous message below your reply (known as top-posting), doesn't work at all well for a discussion group and is strongly discouraged. You should always write your words after the specific sentence or paragraph you're replying to, so that the combination reads from top to bottom like a conversation.

NB: this doesn't just mean scrolling to the bottom of the email and typing your entire reply there! You should interleave your reply, paragraph by paragraph, and of course snip out paragraphs to which you are not directly replying.

Ensure your reply is readable

It's becoming increasingly common for people to follow the other points, but still end up with a message which is very difficult to read because you can't tell the different "speakers" apart. The key is to use the correct prefixing style.

Remember that all colours, bold, italics, and sometimes plain "tabbed" indentation too, will have been stripped out by the time your message reaches the other subscribers to the Forum, so do not rely on such effects to distinguish between speakers. Instead, all replies on the Forum must use the standard tried-and-tested convention of prefixing each line of quoted original text with "> " (greater-than, space).

If the text you are quoting already includes a quotation from a earlier post, then just add an extra "> ". That way it is always clear how far "back" in the conversation each piece of text was first written.

The first quote you use from each individual person should be preceded by an attribution line identifying its author (eg. "Fred wrote:"). You can repeat the attribution line later on if it helps avoid confusion, but don't go to the extreme of adding one before every quote, so that the result looks like the script from a play!

Please don't do this the other way around, indenting or in any other way marking your own text instead of the original message. You should ensure that none of your own new comments begins with ">" (though of course if you have yourself been quoted earlier in the thread, some of your previous words might have several >s by now, which is fine!).

Some email programs will do proper prefixing automatically provided you turn off HTML email (which you have done anyway, haven't you?); nearly all others can be configured to do so. Please investigate how to do this in your email program. The "QuoteFix" plugins for Outlook and Outlook Express are strongly recommended as a simple way of configuring these programs correctly.

Please use a blank line before and after each of your own comments, so that they do not "run in" to the quoted text.

Get into the habit of at least glancing at your own messages when you receive them back - you might be surprised how they look to everybody else!

See also the Mail User Agents page for more specific detailed advice on the use of particular email programs or webmail systems, including links to the "QuoteFix" plugins.

Reply to the right address

Ensure you reply to forum@greenbelt-forum.org.uk, and not owner-forum@greenbelt-forum.org.uk (the first goes to everybody, the second goes just to the list manager). If your mail program insists on sending to owner-forum, you can sometimes fix it by arranging to have a "Reply-To" header added to every received message. To do this, send:

set forum replyto

as the body of an email to majordomo@greenbelt-forum.org.uk.

Please also try not to send your reply to the original sender as well as the forum, or that person will receive two copies of your reply. Setting "replyto" will help with this too.

Note: "replyto" isn't the default, because it's safer that way: you wouldn't want a private reply accidently to go out to the world, would you?!

Read to the end of a thread before replying

Always read the whole of a discussion before replying. Somebody may already have made the same point as you: although there is nothing wrong with some expressions of agreement, a string of emails essentially saying the same thing (or just "I agree") is quite wasteful of space, bandwidth and people's time. If you read and reply to your emails offline and then send them all together when you next connect, this may be less easy, but you should always try - eg. investigate the options in your software to receive messages without also sending queued outgoing ones.

If you find yourself strongly disagreeing with a post or even offended by it, never reply immediately. Take a deep breath; read to the end of the thread; re-read the earlier part of the thread; re-read the post itself. This level of care can often prevent misunderstandings. You may find someone else has already made the comment you were about to make, or that the original poster has already apologised or clarified what was said.

Useful links

(Many of these discussions talk about "newsgroups", which are a very specfic and largely obsolete type of email-like discussion group. However, they are relevant here, because the Forum is much more like a newsgroup than anything else that you might use email for, or than any kind of web-based forum.)

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