Re: Writing a guide for Google users switching to newsreaders

On 2006-07-26, Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2006-07-26, Mike Easter <MikeE@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm just agreeing here and commenting, no disagreement.

snip

If you are a GGer and you are reading a post and you simply click
'reply', your cursor appears at the top of the post to which you are
responding, and is completely untrimmed, including previous sig. The
noob gg/er (likely) will start typing there, just like the noob OEer, ie
a 'setup' for top posting.

This is also the effect of clicking reply in the show options function,
that is, those two reply functions are currently the same.

The google help instructs the 'astute' GGer that they /can/ trim and
contextualize their reply (instead of top posting).

I'll try to get the revised version of my boilerplate to clarify these
points. Thanks :))

New version:

Please quote the relevant text from the article you are replying to, so
that people can see your response in context; this is a newsgroup, not a
web forum :))

The custom is to have a > at the start of each line from the previous post
that you are quoting in yours, and to leave a blank line between the end
of quoted text and the start of what you are typing.

The Google Groups web interface for newsgroups, which you are using,
'quotes' the whole of the article you are replying to, so all you have to
do is to delete the parts that aren't needed for your reply to make sense.
If you want to insert some words of your own in the middle of the quoted
text from the previous article, you can move your 'typing cursor' to the
appropriate point and hit return twice to insert a blank line at that
point, then hit return again to get a new line where you can start typing.
When you've finished that part of your reply, hit return again to get an
empty line between the end of your words and the place where the next
portion of the previous article is 'quoted'.

You should not type anything in a new message on a line that starts with
a > as it will then look as though what you are typing is part of the
previous message that you are replying to.

Most people do not use Google Groups to read and post in newsgroups, and
do not see the articles displayed in the way that Google does it.


--
-- ^^^^^^^^^^
-- Whiskers
-- ~~~~~~~~~~
.

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