On Wed, 31 Dec 2008 09:24 Day, Wally wrote: >Perhaps some of the bickering and misunderstandings would >go away if everyone would quit hitting reply and copying entire >threads into each post. All good suggestions Wally. Those of us who've been on this list for ten years or so will have noted a shift to 'ease of posting' at the expense of 'ease of reading' over that period. In the mid-1990s the only discussion lists were on Usenet and the discipline there was extraordinary by today's lax standards. There are many collections of good rules of netiquette, but the rule Wally is referring to is not to send anything - not a single word - that you don't want other people to read. Generally only people beginning a thread or those making detailed replies will have cause to post more than a screenful of text. The rule about brevity fell into disuse as broadband replaced modems, but now that mobile phones are being used to receive and send text over the internet, there is a new imperative to keep the length of every message to a minimum. Keith