A plea for readability in postings to ADSM-L...

The vagaries of the mail generation and mail gateway software that
some contributing sites employ are resulting in postings which are
often difficult to read.  The valued postings from IBM, for example,
are typically line-wrapped at 70 characters (in the midst of a
word or not), with an equal-sign appearing at that point, and the
rest of the logical line continued on the next physical line.
Text generated in word processing systems typically contains special
characters which end up translated to "=3D" sequences sprinkled
throughout the text.  And sometimes we get contributions entirely
in HTML.

It takes much longer to read and (correctly) interpret contributions
when they are littered with visual "noise", particularly in examples
from config files and report output which inherently contains a lot
of symbology.  Worse, the character debris makes it impossible to
perform reliable searches in the ADSM-L archives when researching
information, undermining the purpose of the archives.  Postings need
to be in plain text to make it into the archives in historically
usable form.

I would encourage submitters to periodically have a look at recent
ADSM-L archives to review how their postings are actually coming
through.  We all want those postings to be of full value both at
the time of posting and for future review.

    thanks,    Richard Sims  Boston University OIT