Subject: Using a suitable right margin in the news and email.

1. *****
 Q: Using a maximum of 72 column right margin in your news postings,
and a few other practical tips.

 A: This first item on the list is not really a FAQ (Frequently
Asked Question) but nevertheless something I would like to draw your
attention to. Most users reading the news probably have a 80 column
terminal program. Consider the implications. If you use too broad
lines, the tails of the lines will be wrapped over to the next line
(or be truncated depending on the reader's terminal program
settings) making your text difficult or impossible to follow. Your
chances of getting good follow-ups or useful answers to the
questions, which you may have asked, are radically diminished.
   But this does not end there. If someone quotes your text with the
usual news convention of preceding your text with ">" an overflow
can follow even if your text does not originally exceed the 80
column limit. In fact there can be multiple quotes. Hence a suitable
maximum right margin wrap in writing to the news is 72 columns. Note
that this problem concerns your signature width as well. Even if
quoting signatures is not a good idea, it is often done. Personally
I have set my editor's wrap at column 69. The same goes for email.
Incidentally, the wrap of this text is set at column 69.

 A2: There are some other useful guidelines to posting. If you read
the news.announce.newusers and news.answers newsgroups you'll soon
see that they give useful advice on various aspects of posting, like
 1) Use a reasonable right margin just like I propounded above.
 2) Don't quote excessively. I am sure that you have seen text
quoted innumerable times in the following manner.
> This is quoted text
Quote judiciously. For example, I most often skip the posting if the
quoted part fills the whole first page of the posting. Quote only
what is essential to make it possible for the reader to understand
what your posting is about. As a rule avoid quoting an entire
message (signatures and all). It is not judicious to quote, say, a
hundred lines of discussion just to input a single line of one's
own. Proper quoting is a skill. If you are going to quote, devote
some time to working the quote appropriately. Don't be lazy in this
respect.
   A further tip adapted from mcr@holly.demon.co.uk (Mark Rogers).
Leave a blank line after the quoted text before you insert your own
because else your text and the quoted text will difficult to
distinguish from each other.
 3) Avoid "me too" postings. People send many questions and requests
to the news. If you have a similar request as someone has posted, do
not post a "me too" follow-up. Many newsgroups have huge numbers of
readers. Think what would happen if even one per cent of the readers
of a newsgroup with for example 80000 readers would all post a "me
too". What a good original poster should do is to make a summary of
the answers if s/he gets his/her answer by email instead of the
answers being posted. (See the later item on asking for emailed
replies for some further thoughts.)
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