Today, as Administrator of several Mailing Lists, I once again was notified of messages that were not accepted for posting to some of the Lists I manage. This is not only aggravating, it is extremely time consuming when I have to wrestle with messages that would have been posted had the senders followed some simple rules. In an effort to "educate" users on proper posting procedures, I offer the following: 1) For those who receive Mailing List posts in the Digest Mode, DO NOT quote back the entire Digest when replying! 2) When you reply, quote back just that portion to which you are replying. Highlight and delete all other portions, including the junk at the bottom of all posts. For those "newbies" who don't know how to "highlight" you put the mouse cursor at the beginning of the text, hold down the left button of the mouse and move the cursor to the end of the text. Release the left mouse button and the text will be "highlighted". Then you just hit the DEL key on the keyboard. 3) When you reply, DO NOT leave the subject line as it was in the Digest. If you do, the subject line will read something like this: "RE: LISTNAME Digest, Vol 2, Issue 2", where LISTNAME is the actual name of the List. This tells readers absolutely nothing about your actual reply or the original post. CHANGE THE SUBJECT LINE TO MATCH THAT OF THE ORIGINAL POST "INSIDE" THE DIGEST. Let's say that message Number 2 inside the Digest actually had the subject of "[LISTNAME] J. A. Smith born in TX". THAT is the subject you need to copy and paste into your reply, not the subject of "LISTNAME Digest, Vol 2, Issue 2". 4) This may seem to be a lot of work for those of you who receive the List postings in Digest Mode, but if you're going to receive in Digest Mode, and you're going to reply to a post in the Digest, you're going to have to follow the rules, that is, don't quote back the entire Digest, AND change the subject line. I don't want to sound too dictatorial, but bad subject lines do no good for anyone. Many subscribers receive posts from dozens of Mailing Lists and just don't have time to actually read the bodies of the hundreds of daily posts they receive. Instead, they rely on Subject Lines to let them know what is in the posts, and to know if they need to read the bodies. Also, when a person replies to ANY post, whether in Digest Mode or not, and quotes back the ENTIRE post, the reply contains superfluous text that is not needed and just takes up more space on the servers at Rootsweb when the posts are "archived". The archived posts are there forever and so is the unnecessary quoting. Thanks for listening, Sarge (George W. Durman, Mailing List Administrator)