MATTERS ARISING FROM THE MEETING ON 25th May
Probably the best attendance for a so-called "surgery" (although they've metamorphosed into sessions looking at more advanced topics.)
The first hour was spent looking at ADSL, and I had (justified) complaints that the file I had placed for download on the website was badly formatted. I have rewritten the file, tested it with Star Office, Wordpad and even 602Office, and it now looks reasonable to me.
I also had complaints that some of you have trouble accessing this web site. You might solve these by using the true, usually hidden, URL for my home page:
Our demonstration of Becky was mainly concerned with accepted standards of message formatting in public forums, and also how to prevent Outlook Express from opening attachments without permission. The following is how to configure OE to conform as best as possible. This is for OE6, although other versions of OE are much the same:
In views - layout, make sure use of the preview pane is NOT checked.
In Options - General. don't check any of the top block of boxes. In Options - Read, do NOT check "automatically download message when viewing in preview pane". In Options - Send, check "include the original message in reply" and uncheck "send reply to messages in the same format as they were sent". Make the default format for both E-mail and News Plain Text. Under plain text settings, make the message sending format Mime, encode text using None. Automatically wrap at 72 (or 76) characters when sending, and check indent the original text with >. In compose, don't use Stationery or Business Cards.
As for formatting replies, the best thing I can do is to repeat advice from another forum:
(1) When posting, put your name and e-mail address at the end of the
post. It makes it easier for somebody to reply to you off the
group.
(2) When posting, limit your line length to 72 characters, or at most
76. This means your post can be read by any e-mail client
without reformatting.
(3) When replying, put your reply AFTER the portion of the original
message to which you are replying, and ONLY include as much of
the original as is necessary to make your context clear. When
replying to a long message, it is best to interlace quote and
reply. Make it clear who is saying
what by a line such as "On 3rd June, Josephine Bloggs said",
and by using an accepted citation prefix at the beginning of
each quoted line. A greater than sign (>) is by far the most
commonly used. Putting your reply before the original message,
and quoting the whole of the original, is known as top posting
"upside down posting" or posting "OE style" and makes it very
difficult to work out who said what and when in long threads.
TOP POSTING IS VERY MUCH FROWNED UPON
(4) When replying, only quote as much of the original message(s) as is
necessary to make sense of your own comments. Except when an
original is very short, make your reply a series of quote -
reply sections.
(5) On the other hand, snipping others' posts to change the meaning is
VERY much frowned upon.
(6) There is no need to make a post just to say "thank you" (do that by
private e-mail) or "I agree" (try to add something to the
thread rather than just agreeing).
Anybody interested in the topic of etiquette and all the many accepted standards is invited to browse http://www.usenet.org and its links.
In two weeks, we will (finally) be looking at Becky in depth. Links for Becky can be found here
Finally, a reminder of my e-mail addresses:
billnot@billnot.com for general mail
questions@billnot.com for questions to be answered in the Grapevine or at a session.