On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Jan A Bergeron VMD wrote:
> I've analyzed my Digests, and on average 60% of every Digest is superfluous
> garbage.

That is the primary reason I edit, the poor Digest subscribers; the digests
are whoppers, one has to page through the same thing over and over, and it
can be very difficult to tell where one message ends and the next begins
(I've asked before, more than once, that there be a more distinctive
demarcation between postings than that short line of dashes, something like
end-of-posting end-of-posting end-of-posting   , which should be easy to
do, but have been ignored).  I've also found that many postings have a lot
of useless "blank" lines and I can usually get rid of at least three per
posting (some may have *many* more).  On a typical day of 40 postings
that's at least 120 lines, or five to six screens the DIGEST subscriber
doesn't have to page through.

Of course, if one is concerned only about the digest, one can GET that and
edit it before it is sent out, but that leaves all the extraneous junk in
the archives, so if you want to take care of that also another editing job
of the notebook log is required; less to edit the posting before it is
distributed.  I don't, now, have to worry about storage space as my host
univerity makes no gripes, though they did ten or so years ago.  But, I see
no reason to abuse their generosity by asking them to store a lot of
pointless repetition because the majority of subscribers are too
thoughtless or lazy to properly quote minimally, if at all.

Douglas Winship
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