ADMIN: List traffic and Similar responses

[Simon Biber]

No: HPFGUIDX 10792

>From 22/01/2001 6:00am until now, 27/01/2001 12:58 am, I have exactly 666
unread messages in my HP4GU folder. :-) (This is somewhat reduced because I
read 3 from my Inbox which explained the change in domain. Lucky I caught
that before I had a completely flooded Inbox -- my sorting rules go on the
To: email address, and I have some groups which have three email
addresses -- they were with Onelist before they merged into eGroups which is
now YahooGroups)

The traffic on this list is phenomenal! I'm on lots of special-interest
mailing lists which receive between 1 and 20 messages a day, but I get
hundreds here. It's to the point where I can't read all the mail without
spending hours -- which I can't do every day and it builds up.

I wonder if it's possible to use the 'sister' eGroups (sorry, YahooGroups)
to spread the traffic out so that people can tune into what they like (such
as ships or fanfic -- as much as I like reading expositions on ship
preferences, there's just so much traffic that it obscures the more, um,
interesting new ideas.)

Looking at the group membership, 600 people is not that many, it's just that
we are very prolific, and it has a cumulative effect as people reply many
times. Lots of the groups I'm on have 5x that number or subscribers, but
people don't sit there and doggedly reply to every message. (*Amy*? or is it
that there are lots of Amies? <g>). I agree with Neil's recent message that
people should check if a question has been answered below before firing off
the reply -- and just add a little to that reply rather than write it all
again.

I'd also like to stress that people need to hack into the message they are
quoting from and only show the relevant part above each bit of reply. Also
it's important to make clear what's yours and what's quoted. There are lots
of ways of doing this, but an internet pseudo-standard is to use the >
(greater than) sign _in_front_of_each_line_ not just once for the paragraph.
Eg:

> this is quoted line 1
> and this is line 2

rather than

> this is line 1
and line 2

You also need to make sure there is a blank line between what you quote and
the reply, to clearly separate it. This form of quoting is easily extended
to multiple levels, eg.

> > We should all use a similar form, and I
> > think this is fairly good
>
> Yeah it's much better than the posts all over the place.

Simon Biber.