[Coco] One point of view

[Wayne Campbell]

William Astle wrote:>I must respectfully disagree with the idea of maintaining the entire history of a discussion indefinitely. That is plain wasteful.

Looking at it from your perspective, I can agree that attaching the history is wasteful. However, I am looking at it from the reality of what is sent through a list like this one. Practically every message has the entire thread included in the post, whether it's all relevant to the current response or not. My thought is, which is more wasteful: 20K worth of message history in the body of the message, or 5K worth of message text and 5K worth of compressed text in a zip file that's attached?

I did a little test. I took a text file that is 15,467 bytes in size, and I zipped it up in a zip file. The resulting size of the .zip file is 5,598 bytes. I would think that 10K is less than 20K no matter how you slice it. And since the histories *are going to be included* in the message posts *regardless of whether or not anyone likes it or agrees with it*, then it should be dealt with in a way that reduces the size, and still allows the users to include the history.

The alternative is to prohibit message histories, except for short quotes for quoted replies.

William Astle wrote:>This list, for instance, *does* have an archive. It can be found by following the footer at the bottom of *every* message.

Do you mean this?
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I have a few questions for everyone on this list.
How often do you *really* go to the archive to read a message thread history?
How often do you just read the attached history instead?
How often do you feel like you're wasting time scrolling through a long message history just to read a one line response?

And yet, we still add long histories, regardless of their length, and justify it by talking about wasting space with an archive file that, in reality, would make the bandwidth smaller, not larger. If we could get all thread histories to be archived and not allow adding it to the message text, except in small quotes, we would reduce the bandwidth as much as it is possible to do. But we are not going to see this.

First, the list operator is not going to spend the time necessary to check each and every post for length of content.

Second, the idea is that longer posts are better, if they include content. Since most content is less than 10 lines, long posts would never occur, except in a case like this where an actual discussion ensues.

Third, people are people. They are mostly predictable, and are creatures of habit. And we all choose the easiest path to achieve an end. In terms of posting to a list, it's reply and send. Do only what is required to "clean it up" before sending, which is mostly not doing anything.

I know that different email programs handle things differently when it comes to quoting. Yahoo, which is the email program that I use, quotes the entire message when I click the reply button. It also places the quote below the current insertion point. I can delete the entire history if I want to, but I have learned through corresponding with others to work on a project, or to gain information about a program, or for anything that could be considered collaborative, that deleting the entire history works against the effort. Therefore, keeping the history "close" is pretty much a requirement. It's all about what makes things easier and more convenient for the user.

William Astle wrote:>If they want to read a message, they have no option to avoid downloading the extra 20K or so of history which may cost them a non-trivial amount when compounded over multiple messages.

Again, which is worse? Having to download a 20K post, or downloading a 5K post with a 5K attachment? And I do believe that most current devices allow the user to decide whether or not they wish to download an attached file.

Wayne