> > I've started to pick this habit up myself. Yet on other forums I'm on they merely delete the entire last message and type away with their own stuff. The whole reason I brought this up is because I want to know why you guys write replies this way, and if you always did. I'm intrigued.
> >
> > Qua "has nothing better to do than closely inspect message forum replies" rtz
> > ~~*Q*~~
>
> This is how it was always done, back in the infancy of usenet*. To assist the reader's recollections of what was said, there would be a quoted part signified by a > (or |) and the new poster would reply underneath the quoted part.
>
> However, with the onset of Outlook and Outlook Express, you have people replying before the quoted part (or rather, the original message). This caused people to read the new stuff first and, on a long string of messages, old orignal messages would be stacked underneath, never to be read.

I've grown to tolerate that, but I don't like it. When I adapted this message forum script from Matt's Script Archive, I was quick to change the message quoting rules to the Usenet standard. The angle brackets used to be colons, and I made sure that at the end of every message, there were exactly two blank lines, so that if you start a reply at the bottom, you're automatically at the correct starting place.

Quoting messages by surrounding text with (())'s or ""'s or other punctuation marks is ineffective, because you can't conveniently quote back more than one message. In a long thread, where it's important to see the course of conversation, it's simple to see the chain of replies by multiple levels of > prefixes.

Furthermore, when you reply to something underneath the quoted text, you preserve the semblance of a conversation. The train of logic is uninterrupted. By replying above, you're throwing out what you have to say, and then there's this clump of seaweed hanging down beneath. Invariably, a quoted message BENEATH your reply is NOT edited down to the essential pieces you are replying to. Consequently, quoting the message at all is unhelpful to the person who wrote it (he REMEMBERS what he wrote -- the purpose of quoting any of a message back to someone is to provide context for the reply, not to say, "Oh, here is what you said to me.") and useless to third parties (read the reply, and THEN what's being replied to, and THEN read what THAT is being replied to, etc? How does reading a conversation BACKWARDS make any sense??).

So yes, I'm very opinionated about this. The originators of Usenet knew what they were doing, and then when AOL gave their users internet access and FLOODED Usenet, a whole lot of people who didn't understand mucked it up. And now even the writers of commercial email software packages don't get it.

I'm ranting about this mostly for old times. Alas, I don't even remember the last time I got up in arms about this. In fact, I'm probably inadvertently attacking maybe half of you, who use the "reply above" method, but the truth is I don't even notice the use of one quoting method or another anymore.

Wolf, I think both your theories are correct. We *are* showing our age, AND we know what's most effective. :-)