[CQ-Contest] Evolution of the ARRL DX Exchange

Steve Harrison k0xp at dandy.net
Sat Feb 23 09:50:56 EST 2008


At 06:28 AM 2/23/2008 -0500, Pete Smith wrote:
>What's up with the dramatic increase in the number of messages with no 
>paragraph breaks and weird strings (“ooo”) in place of normal 
>punctuation, and even apostrophes?  It makes messages dreadfully hard to 
>read, and frankly leads me often to ignore what may be useful views or 
>information.  An example is below.

Those oddball ASCII characters are because the sender used Rich Text or
HTML to write their message. The server that passes on the post puts those
in, and our text-only e-mail readers interpret them as the oddball ASCII
characters.

But the tendency for people to no longer capitalize the beginning word of
sentences, or to not use periods at the end, or to even use a bunch of
periods as one of us does exclusively.....  is getting harrowing, agreed.
Some of these folks apparently work in IT and think they're saving time by
not using caps. Personally, I think they're just lazy and inconsiderate.

It's like using oddball cut numbers where they are not needed.

;o)

Steve, K0XP


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