Still, there are some things we could all do to make this forum more enjoyable and easier to follow. Therefore, I would like to announce the following policy changes that I think will improve the overall quality of the board and make it easier to read.

1) One word responses such as: cool, neat, thanks, huh, etc. will be deleted unless the subject matter truly merits such a response (...moderators decision). These type of responses add little to a thread and in fact make it more difficult to follow. They also make the daily summary page less effective.

2) Cluster-posting is not allowed. Cluster-posting is when a single individual posts two or more consecutive responses in the same thread. Once again, this is unnecessary and makes it harder to follow the thread. If you can't limit your response to a single post at a time, you should probably reconsider what you are trying to say and try to do it more succinctly. If you insist on cluster-posting, all but the first response will be deleted.

3) Try limiting the use of the "Reply with Quote" feature. Usually there is no reason to quote the entire thread in your response - even if you do it in parts. If you use the feature, try editing the quoted part down to the portion that you wish to respond to. Once again, this will make it easier to read and follow the thread.

I hope you will agree with me that these changes should improve the overall quality of the board and make the experience more enjoyable for all. As always, feel free to contact me if you have questions or suggestions.

There is noting worse than seeing a post where someone has quoted a whole post and then makes a 2 or 3 word answer or one sentence. This to me has been very annoying. Sometimes I do is scroll down to get past the "quote" to eventually read what the poster has to say.

Personally, in the case of a long thread, I find it exceedingly difficult to follow posts that roam from one topic to another. In one sentence someone is responding to one person, and in the next sentence goes on to respond to a different person's idea. The "reply with quote" feature eliminates this difficulty as you have a quote (hopefully short) and then a response to that particular idea. Then moving on to another quote, and a response to what is addressed specifically in that quote. Without small snippets of the message which is being responded to, I often find myself scrolling up the thread to see which message this or that might be in response to.

"Cluster-posting", I think, is a result of the "reply with quote" feature. It most often occurs because you can only "reply with quote" to one message at a time, so if you want to quote many different people, it requires many different posts unless you want to manually insert each quote into the same message, using two browser windows, etc. and so forth. That is, frankly, too much work. Of course without the "reply with quote" feature there would be no cluster posting, but in the end I think that without quotes it would make threads far MORE difficult to follow, as you would have to first determine what statement was being replied to with each statement and so on. In my experience this can, as I say, be very irritating. The use of quotes is the only way to effectively respond to individual statements rather than a general topic, and "cluster-posting" is (with this rather antiquated software) the only way to effectively use quotes when replying to more than one individual posts.

I will certainly try to abide by these rules in the future, but I fear they will have the opposite effect, making the forum more difficult, not easier, to follow, as a result of the discouragement of use of the "reply with quote" feature.

quote:

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Originally posted by joe at travelpage:
First of all, let me welcome all the new CruiseTalk members who have joined up recently. Last week we set a record for number of posts in a week and a fair number of them were quite educational and informative.

Still, there are some things we could all do to make this forum more enjoyable and easier to follow. Therefore, I would like to announce the following policy changes that I think will improve the overall quality of the board and make it easier to read.

1) One word responses such as: cool, neat, thanks, huh, etc. will be deleted unless the subject matter truly merits such a response (...moderators decision). These type of responses add little to a thread and in fact make it more difficult to follow. They also make the daily summary page less effective.

2) Cluster-posting is not allowed. Cluster-posting is when a single individual posts two or more consecutive responses in the same thread. Once again, this is unnecessary and makes it harder to follow the thread. If you can't limit your response to a single post at a time, you should probably reconsider what you are trying to say and try to do it more succinctly. If you insist on cluster-posting, all but the first response will be deleted.

3) Try limiting the use of the "Reply with Quote" feature. Usually there is no reason to quote the entire thread in your response - even if you do it in parts. If you use the feature, try editing the quoted part down to the portion that you wish to respond to. Once again, this will make it easier to read and follow the thread.

I hope you will agree with me that these changes should improve the overall quality of the board and make the experience more enjoyable for all. As always, feel free to contact me if you have questions or suggestions.

Joe at TravelPage.com

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quote:

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Originally posted by annnthony:
MALCOLM's next post will be 6900.... incredible!!!....will he ever be caught?

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Cluster posting (like this) does not help my total, as the number does not increase if you post in the same thread. I have probably doubled 6900, maybe I need to get out more?

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Originally posted by Malcolm @ cruisepage:
Cluster posting (like this) does not help my total, as the number does not increase if you post in the same thread.

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Ah yes it does!

A peculiarity in the software makes it look as though it does not, but it does.

For instance, at this moment, my previous post on this thread says that I have made 4221 posts. I am sure that once this one is posted, that number will change.

When you make a post, the number on the bottom shows how many posts you have made, up until that one. When you make another post in the same thread, the number on all of your other posts in that thread are also updated.

Periodically (I don't know exactly when), the number on all of your posts is updated. So if you go back to your very first post on this forum, it will not say "1" underneath. I'm not sure exactly how that works; either when a therad is pulled up that has not been for a long time, the numbers are updated, OR the computer updates the numbers in every thread at some pre-set interval. Perhaps Joe knows?

quote:

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Originally posted by cruiseny:
A peculiarity in the software makes it look as though it does not, but it does.

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