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Learn how to read Usenet posts

How does the reply sytem works?

Now that is rather easy. Let demonstrate this with an example post. We assume that the following post was made by a poster named Frank:

Peter <pete12456@aol.com> wrote:
> Linda <linda.ps13@home.com> wrote:
>>
>>>>> I think this NG is quite boring.
>>>>> I wouldn't stay here another second.
>>
>> Great, exactly the kind of people we are looking for!
>> If you don't like it here, why don't you go to
>> another group?
>
> Don't ask me, probably he hasn't understood how Usenet
> works up to now.

Or he is just a dumbass.

On Usenet it's common practice to first quote the text you are commenting and then place your comments below. This is done by placing ">" in front of each quoted line. On top of a post you always mention from whom you are quoting text. Many people don't understand why one should quote text before replying, but that's easy to explain. In our example above, Frank wrote only one line "Or he is just a dumbass." If no text were quoted above, Frank's comment is pretty out of context, isn't it? And people who haven't read any previous post have no idea what Frank is actually talking about.

Of course you may say: "Why don't people simply read the previous posts, if they like to know what Frank is talking about?". Sure, that's an idea, but the the previous post might have already expired and isn't available on the server any longer. Maybe it never even was available on the server, because of a poor propagation, you never know. And without any previous posts, Frank's comment is completely useless for the reader.

Now back to our example above:
We can see that Frank is relying to a post from Peter (lines that start with ">") and Peter was replying to a post from Linda (lines that start with ">>"). Linda was replying to a comment of an unknown poster (lines that start with ">>>>>"). The number of >'s in front tells us, how often something was already quoted in the past. The two lines of the unknown poster got already quoted 5 times, meaning Linda didn't reply to his post directly, but she probably removed the replies of 3 other people.

Many people always ask: "Why replying below the quotes, why not on top of them?" Well, top-posting is very infamous on Usenet. People read from top to bottom (at least in western cultures) and when posting on top, you force them to scroll around within the post (first to the bottom, to read the quotes and then back to top, to read your reply). Even worse, if everyone is a top poster, you have to read the whole post from bottom to top, which is very annoying.

It's very important to not overquote. Keep the quoted text short, meaning remove everything you aren't addressing directly in your reply, as it's only a waste of space and bandwidth. That's something most top-posters aren't doing, another reason why those people aren't famous on Usenet. It's also common practice to sometimes break quotes into smaller pieces and comment every piece separately. This technique is neither possible when top-posting and thus we have another argument that speak against this style of posting.

Another thing you might find in a message once a while is ">Name>", instead of ">". This is done if a piece of text is quoted too often. If there are too many different levels of quote chars, it's hard for the reader to memorize how many chars represent which poster. In that case it's helpful to place the name of the posters between two quote chars. Now it's not possible anymore to see how often something was quoted, but you will always immediately see who the poster was.

Warning:
Nowadays some people thing it's funny to use other chars for quoting, like "|", ":", "*", "$" and so on. Actually the correct way is using ">", but also ":" and "|" are recognized by most news readers - the others usually not! I would stick to ">", since it's easy to read, doesn't cause any trouble and has been used for quite a long time now.

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