Why do people Cut & Paste parts (or all) of a post into their own?

This has come from the practices in Usenet. There, it is considered correct netiquette to place the paragraph (or the whole post) from the prior post into your own when you make a response.

There are many different NewsReaders out there. Each one has the ability to determine how long the posts in a group stay on the board. In alt.discuss, the posts have a 30 day shelf life. In some Usenet groups, the posts have only a 15 or even a 4 day shelf life.

With a short shelf life, it is easy for the original post in a thread to disappear before all the discussion is done.

Also, each NewsReader may carry different posts from a group. It is possible for there to be 10 posts in a thread, and you might only see 6 of them. A NewsReader may drop all posts from a certain domain (like AOL or WebTV). The computer users are aware of this, so C&Ping the information they are responding to is the way to make sure that everyone knows what everyone else is talking about.

WebTV has given us the capability to Cut & Paste, after years of our begging for it. Computers have something called "quoted text" which we cannot do, but with a little effort we can use the C&P and we can now follow normal nettiquette.

WebTVers have been flamed for a long time in Usenet for not adding the info they were responding to. Computer users just did not understand that we didn't have the capability.

So, why do people practice this in alt.discuss? Well, correct nettiquette is correct nettiquette. Just because WebTV is not a computer doesn't mean that we cannot (or should not) follow the established patterns that are used throughout the rest of the world. Besides, in a long thread it makes it much easier to follow if you don't have to scroll up again just to see what someone is responding to. Especially if you use the "Next New" on the sidebar.

Robin