Dear listers,
As time goes and more people take advantage of the internet for many and varied
reasons, the length of messages on this, and other, lists seems to be growing at
an alarming rate. By this I mean the responses made by people WITHOUT troubling
to "snip" unnecessary text from the previous message when replying.
Take, for example "WLS-MERIONETHSHIRE Digest, Vol 2, Issue 54" which had 5
responses to the Copyright thread. This, in digest form, was 22,596 bytes long,
with more than 500 lines. After some judicious snipping, this digest could have
been 4,050 bytes long with just over 100 lines. "WLS-MERIONETHSHIRE Digest, Vol
2, Issue 54" was even longer, for the same reason.
I ask this for several reasons.
1. All responses are archived by Rootsweb, unnecessary text
simply fills up the archive sooner than needed.
2. Long messages take longer to download, a particular problem
for those still using modems at 56K.
3. Finding the new message from amongst the repeated text can
be tedious - very often we read these messages to see if we
can be of help, if we can't find the message itself there's a
possibility that the help won't be forthcoming because the message
wasn't read.
If we keep correspondence in our inboxes or other folder there shouldn't be a
need to include previous text in new postings, just enough to maintain the gist.
Additionally, all corresspondence is archived and available at
http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/intl/WLS/WLS-MERIONETHSHIRE.html
So please, for the sake of future research, take the "snip".
Eryl V Roberts
Ynys Môn
UK