On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 08:42, Roy <linuxcanuck@
> I wonder why trimming is being urged. Are people paying for the hosting
> bandwidth or are they merely complaining about download time? I don't know
> because I have had broadband for over ten years. I can't even imagine using
> dial up today because back when I used dial up the www did not have the
> content that it has now. Add to this that people use phones, netbooks and
> other devices for accessing the web. It is a confusing issue of enforcing
> uniform rules when there is no conformity in the way people are accessing
> the forums. I am on many forums and there are few that enforce any rules.
> Everything seems to go. I agree that people tend to trim, but not
> aggressively.
>
See? Effective trimming. (I'm just poking fun Roy, not being serious)...
Back when, the trimming rules came about because of bandwidth...
imagine downloading a thread that had grown to 50 or 100k in size, on
a 1200bps modem... I shudder at the memories.
These days, it's, IMHO, not a bandwidth issue so much as a trimming
the fat issue. As Scott said, trimming off all that crap that Yahoo
or whatever adds to the bottom of yahoogroups posts, or people with
those stupidly long signatures (the ones full of nonstandard chars and
the legal wall-o-text that some companies put at the bottom of each
outgoing text.
It also helps to trim out the things that probably don't belong in the
rest of the conversation.
For example, this bit from my last post (and I am not picking on the
OP at all on this:
>> Of course, some folks seem to get a severe case of "moderator-itis"
>
>The folks, round here, that seem to get "moderator-itis" are the same
>ones that take their personal time, for free, to help out with
>answers, research, and discussion. They've earned the right to their
>moderator-itis.
>
>But elsewhere, I know what you mean... one particular forum I frequent
>calls it "back seat moderating"
>
>> a free forum host some time back. (In some ways, in fact, a decent
>> forum is superior to a mail list like this one, as it makes it much
>> simpler for newcomers to find out what has been said about any given
>> topic previously.)
I trimmed a good bit of stuff from that paragraph that was not at all
relevant, really. it was cool learning that the OP once ran a mailing
list with 18,000 subscribers and an average of 200 posts per day, but
none of that was germane to the response...
Trimming is more an art than a science, you need to trim enough to get
rid of unnecessary stuff, but leave enough for context so that the
next guy knows whats going on.
A good example of seeing this done right (usually) is on programming
lists when someone posts code and asks "Why doesn't this work?".
Generally most of the program is trimmed out, and only the failing
lines are left in, with enough lines of code before to easily locate
that spot in the original program.
Cheers,
jeff
No comments:
Post a Comment