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From: bnews@nixpbe.UUCP (Martin Boening)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: Filler lines
Message-ID: <460@nixpbe.UUCP>
Date: 23 Aug 89 05:25:43 GMT
References: <21376@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Organization: Nixdorf Computer AG, Paderborn, Germany
Lines: 31

Well, I guess filler lines are bad because they circumvent a news
restriction: to never send postings which include more text from other
articles than is written by the followup-writer. If a conrtibution to
a discussion is 10 lines, you simply should not include 600 lines of
reference (like in those 'Subject: Re: blabla (long)' where the whole
blabla gets included).

Usually a short summary of the article being followed up to should
suffice to make your meaning clear and show what you're refering to.
Readers who need to know more can always look at the reference line
in the header to find articles containing more about the discussion.

If you're answering questions, just include the question itself, don't
use the text leading up to it. This will usually be enough to help
people see what you're refering to.

If you absolutely insist on filler lines, use VERY short text. This
minimizes the waste byte count :-)

BTW: You'll notice that I didn't include the base article. So, if you
don't know what the heck I'm talking about, read the article referred
to in the References: line.

So long

Martin
-- 
Martin Boening, c/o Nixdorf Computer AG, DS-CC2, Paderborn, West-Germany
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