Why did you create 17 separate posts? You could have fit every point in 1 post. Now it is a pain to scroll through all the pages.
Just because all the points
could be crammed into a single posting, it does
not logically follow that they
should be.
I created different posts because I wanted to respond to the points individually.
This is at least a
reasonable practice, and in many instances, it's even a
laudable practice, for focusing a discussion on the points actually being discussed.
The opposite style, which is cluelessly common on Internet message-boards, is for replies to repeatedly quote
whole screen-long (or longer) postings--sometimes in multiple layers--only to respond to a single sentence or a few sentences. That abusively bloats not only the storage required by a Web server, but also the amount of data it must transfer over the network, both of which have limits for Web-hosting accounts. The limits are enforced either by shutting down public access to the server, or by suddenly imposing additional charges. In the case of
CathInfo, we all should consider that the
Web server being abused is the one that
Matthew is
personally paying for. It's
he who is the ultimate victim of having CathInfo shut down or incurring additional charges. Yet this excessive-quoting habit is common even among some of the more established CathInfo members.
It's
much more of "a
pain to scroll" through a topic that's accuмulated postings in the latter style: The pain of
much more scrolling, and the dissatisfaction of displaying
much less new content for each reader's effort. And not only is that a pet peeve of mine, but also one established decades ago.
[...] one doesn't rack up 15,000+ posts between CI and Fisheaters [...] by practicing that kind of common courtesy. One acheives that feat by [...] spreading a single post's worth of material across as many individual posts as possible.
When the original material is so logically separated that its points can be sensibly presented as bulleted items or even
numbered items, separating them into separate replies is
not a violation of Internet
courtesy a.k.a.
netiquette at all. Quite the contrary: It is
conforming to it. Eventual replies to separated items will likely be shorter and better focused.
I'd like to post a link to a presentation of
netiquette (i.e.: "net" + "etiquette) that's modernized for WIMP-interface
- Internet forums
- , so readers would be able to recognize violations of it, but they seem to be becoming as scarce as discussions of "sin" in the Novus Ordo religion.
But I digress.
Note *: WIMP = windows + icons + mice + pointers.
Note #: As distinct from the ARPAnet/Usenet mailing lists and Usenet news groups from which they descended.