On Sun, 13 Sep 1998, Ryan Anderson wrote:

...

The problem is that most of the AOL users who publish to the net seem to be morons. They use some annoying Russo-Germanic quoting style, they can't use English, they're clueless, they post off-topic, or something else.

In all fairness, many of the users on AOL *know* that the AOL quoting style is utterly horrible. Unofrtunatley, they don't have much choice in what they use.

Sure they do. They can use a different mail reader. (After all, 32-bit AOL allows AOL users to use all the TCP/IP protocols...) They can cut and paste manually, or, probably best, they can go to another ISP. I understand what you're saying, Ryan, and I understand what they're saying, but there all alternatives out there; they just don't want to use them. In fact, they've installed proprietary packages that do this. There are plenty of free alternatives out there which don't have this problem. If my ISP pushed a bunch of proprietary software down my throat, I'd find another ISP. That goes double if the proprietary software sucks. That goes triple if the software sucks and the ISP is trying to get every idiot they can to use it. (I got a "100 hours free network abuse" disk in the mail recently from AOL.) Another AnonMonger