[Aztlan] Formatting Your Aztlan Posts -- Please Read

[David Hixson]

Estimados Listeros,

For those of you following the Nahuatl thread, you may
have noticed that Nick's earlier post on Achiote was
accidentally included in a reply.  Clearly an innocent
mistake, but a symptom of a common problem...

The "comments" section at the end of our recently
completed survey indicate that many of our members
would appreciate it if everyone would please take care
to delete all but the most important quotes from
previous posts when replying to a message.

This is proper list etiquette on any listserv (and
part of the rules outlined in the "welcome" message
you all received when first subscribing to Aztlan).

When replying to a message on-list, you should take
any previous messages and delete (or "snip") all text
except your own and possibly a relevant quote from the
previous message.  If you have kept your subject
heading the same (which is also proper list
etiquette), readers will know where to go for the full
text of previous messages.

This is especially important for those who subscribe
to the daily digest format.  If you simply hit "reply"
to a daily digest, all previous messages from that day
are tagged to the bottom of your email.  Please delete
all of this extra text, except for pertinent quotes
you need in order to respond, then change your subject
heading (from the Daily Digest subject heading) to
reflect the topic under discussion.

In addition to this being an issue of simple list
etiquette, Daily Digest members are an increasingly
large portion of our membership.  Allowing all of the
extra text to be appended to every message makes the
Daily Digest very difficult to read.

Moderators reserve the right to reject posts that
include pages of previous posts below new messages. 
We hope this won't be necessary, but we may
occasionally do so, just to remind certain subscribers
to follow this rule.  Of course, no one will mind an
occasional mistake.

Please remember, Moderators cannot alter your posts,
so we cannot snip off unnecessary text nor correct
your subject headings before posting to the list.  We
can only approve, reject-with-comment or discard.

-Dave

__________________________________________________
David R. Hixson
Aztlan Moderator &
Doctoral Candidate
Tulane University
Dept. of Anthropology
__________________________________________________
"Nothing more useless than a bored archaeologist."
-Douglas Adams


       
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