Removed Ceiling Fan - Set of Lights Not Working

I'm agreeing with you. Let's say someone makes a post and somewhere in it they say that Stalin was a great man. I reply to it, disagreeing. Later someone goes to my reply post and starts in addressing the original Stalin is great comment that I did not make. It then could be easily confused, with some people thinking that I was the one who made the Stalin is great comment. It's made worse when, as is often the case, these people start out addressing some comment that I actually did make, then later in the same post, switch to addressing the Stalin comment that someone else made.

OK...that's what I thought...just wanted to make sure.

I don't object at all your bringing up what you had said before. In general and because in this case I wouldn't have known about it otherwise.

Maybe my description is not clear enough, but I think they do. D is replying to C and yet all of the immediately preceding thread is still there, because nothing, or only other parts, have been snipped. We have threads that are 30 pposts deap and their can be 25 prior attibution lines, some with accompanying text, some without, even though only the most recent one is being replied to.

No, I don't think it's rude, not at all. I think in many cases it is better. A thread on a topic with any controversy typically has one person saying one thing, the next person saying the opposite, maybe a third person disagreeing with the second and agreeing with the first, and so on.

I often see incremental problems with statements on both or all sides. If the people I reply to agreed with my amendments, that could mean they agree with each other more than it seems, and I think it helps if they can see in one place that I'm not just disagreeing with B but with the person they are arguing with. That I'm in the middle and they shouldn't reflexively write off what I've written. I think other readers seeing all this one one post could have a more balanced view of the topic.

If my answers were scattered all over several posts, if I were that "other reader" reading the thread, I coudln't keep track of the point being made. I can't explain all the reasons but I think, other than the possibility that someone will think i'm replying to a different person from who I am, answering several people in the same post is a big benefit to the reader. (It also saves space on the news server harddrives.)

I see both sides of this too, and like I say, I dont' mind at all your bringing it up.

I think my newsreader does that too, but in this case I scrolled up a few weeks and searched on the subject line. It only found the thread, not the specific post, but that's good enough. I'd want to review the whole thread anyhow.

That was the thread started by Nurse Ratched. I'm busy sometimes and I don't read every post, and this one had 109 posts and I didn't even retrieve 79 of them, including not retrieving my own post that you objected to, or yours.

I only posted in it 4 times and 50+ stupid posts, half of them, would get more than 4 replies from me if I'd actually read them.

Had I seen it, the answer I woudl have given is pretty much what I said to Marilyn. I'm still trying to convince you that's a reasonable position.

But I don't see it that way and if it's not written down and I don't see it that way. there was no reason for me to conider it poor etiquette.

How about if I address comments in the middle like we've been discussing to the person I'm replying to. I already do this sometimes in Facebook, which it seems is supposed to say who you are replying to if you click Reply, but it does't always. And they have no attribution lines and the put yor answer half-way to the bottom instead of right below the post you're replying to, so sometimes I have to repeat the sentence I'm replying to. Conversely, when I read other posts that say, You're right, I often don't know who was right or what he was right about. IOW Facebook has terrible software so I make allowances for it. OTOH I've figured all this time that Usenet's excellent use of attribution lines made everything clear. Since you say it doesn't I offer the suggestion at the start of this paragraph.

I'll try to remember to do this. I'll do my best but it took me weeks to remember to take my cellphone with me when I go to the car. It took weeks for me to remember to take my glasses with me when I leave the bedroom. It's taken me weeks to learn to turn off the fan when I leave the room with the computer. All three of these I really want to do; I'm not doing them because someone else wants me to, and I still used to forget all the time. I still forget all of them once in a while but I do much better than I used to.

The similarity was that there was a disagreement on what is proper.

I'm not sure what that has to do with the current situation. That's a completely different issue, totally unrelated to what we've been discussing. In your example, people should snip the parts that they aren't replying to, but it's easier/lazier to just leave it. Too much snipping, as well as too little snipping, are both bad, for certain values of bad. I'm as guilty of this as anyone.

Back to the current topic, though. If A creates a post, then B comes along and replies to that post, and in B's follow-up he replies to what A wrote, then so far so good. If C then comes along and replies to B's post, and in C's post he replies to what A wrote, that's a problem. If C wants to reply to A, he should reply to A's post, not B's post. It's poor etiquette* to reply to someone via another post. Historically, people usually do that so they can reply to someone that they've KF'd/plonked. Maybe not a big deal in this group, but it's enough to get you noticed in a bad way in certain other groups.

I think it's the same issue. A and B have their names in the attribution lines and their text is quoted even though in Marilyn's wordzs, rougghly, their words have nothing to do with what D is saying to C.

BTW, it's because I think it's the same thing I didn't know what you meant when you said a couple posts ago that I was the primary "offender". Because lots of people are in D's shoes, or E, F, G, H, etc. quoting text of people who are not part of the latest exchange.

Tnat was not my example. It was not that C was replying to A, it's that D is replying to C. And what was written by A and B is still there with attribution lines saying they wrote their parts. Were D to delete what A and B wrote, in many cases what C wrote would be incomprehensible. Readers would have to go find a prior post where the subject was explained. This would be a lot like the posts from Homeowners where they quote nothign and often I dont' know what they're talking about.

You say that like it's a fact but I think it was you who said it was not written anywhere. I don't doubt that you think it's poor etiquette, but I think it's often a good idea and never a bad idea. And I gave my reasons for that. What do we do now?

Did you see my suggestion that I would label replies in the middle with the name of the person I was replying to so no one would think it was the person named at the very top? Won't that prevent misunderstandings?

I don't know about these other groups. Mostly these days I read Windows and other computer groups. No one has complained about my style and I don't try to post differently there.

Okay. Understood.