In article , Mark lewis wrote:
> 2. don't fall afoul of thinking that everyone reading usenet uses a
> newsreader... many are connected via BBSes...

I doubt that there are "many" people using usenet at all, these days. I
will allow that some of those that do choose to eschew the convenience
of dedicated newesreader software -- I will even allow that those few
may represent a greater proportion of the total of usenet users than was
the case in the heyday of usenet -- but I wouldn't say "many" did so ...
not since dedicated newsreader software became commonplace.

.. but I see you're using something called vSoup. I thought I knew
newsreaders, but I don't recall ever hearing of that before now.

> 3. define "proper newsreader" and "non-standard quoting prefixes"
> ... i can tell you know that i've been quoting and using the same
> quoting prefix methodology for 30 years... that seems to be pretty
> standard to me ;)

I would say that "non-standard quoting prefixes" are quoting prefixes
that do not conform to a standard.

The nearest thing we have to a standard is probably RFC3676, which is
"only" 14 years old. That RFC addresses the problem of (re-)flowing
paragraph text in internet messages (specifically MIME, used by both
mail and news services) to remain within the line lengths specified for
SMTP and NNTP, and in doing so it makes use of the already widely
accepted convention of prefixing quoted lines with '>' characters.

That convention is rather older. RFC1849 was not published until March
2010 -- a mere 8 years ago -- but its text is the content of the
"son-of-1036" memo written by Henry Spencer in around 1993/4. I note
that the use of '>' as a prefix for quoted text it presented there
without comment, suggesting that its acceptance as a 'standard' way to
represent quoted text was already so widespread as to require no
explanation. 24 years ago.

Yeah, OK, you've been doing it differently for 30 years -- and I note
your wry smiley -- but sometimes it pays to move with the times, and I'd
argue that compatibility with the RFC3676 *standard* was a good reason
to do so, here.

--
Cheers,
 Daniel.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05