st: RE: RE: Correct Way to Respond to Posts when Email is Turned Off

[Nick Cox <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

But there is an FAQ on these issues. It is called the Statalist FAQ and every posting carries the URL. 

It is just that we don't try to lay down the law on quite how "Re:" and "st:" should be ordered. As different mailers are likely to do different things, I don't think we want to try to establish a preference on that. 

But we do say

"Edit previous postings 

Edit mail so that readers see easily what the issue is and what your contribution is. Please do not repost the whole of a very long message together with your one-sentence tidbit. Your mailer may have a facility to select a block of text and then reply quoting only that text."

-- even though most people ignore that request of very long standing. 

Some members never delete a single character, so that their postings in long contorted threads end up with multiple copies of 

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Presumably the upshot of a cost-benefit analysis of "What benefit do I get from spending time editing this?" is automatic.

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Ben Hoen

Correction, I do get the digest.  (Once a day early in the morning.)  I
realized I had set it up to save in a folder automatically, and, obviously,
don't often look at it.

My question was more about the syntax of the reply to a post.  For example
do you use:

"st: RE: <post title>" or "RE: st: RE: <post title>".  The goal here would
be to have a response to a particular post inside a thread line up
correctly.  

Similarly, do you scrub the bottom of the email (of, for instance, the post
to which you are replying), and only include your reply, OR, do you include
the text from the post, below you reply. The main goal here is to avoid the
"[no subject], Unknown (date time)" post, but, also, as above, to have the
response to a particular responders thread line up with that thread.

This, now seems, like splitting hairs, IOW, the system is working(!), but,
if there was a right answer to this, us only-digest-members (and especially
future only-digest-members) might benefit from a FAQ on these issues.  The
goal being to keep the list and threads well organized.


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