"Victor J. Osborne, Jr." wrote in message
...
I prefer to send bare replies rather than include the orig. post. I seem
to spend all of my time scrolling down to the bottom of a lengthy post.

I had no idea someone would not have the reply post in hand or right
above.

Perhaps I'll look at including the orig. post IF it's small.

The problem with relying on the 'reply post in hand or right above', is that
posts travel the net from server to server along different paths. The
order in which they arrive at your server is not necessarily the order in
which they arrive at any other server. The order in which your response,
similarly, arrives at the other servers can vary from server to server.
The order of posts is indeterminate in the general case. The message to
which you are responding may well arrive at some servers *after* the
response, might not have arrived yet, or might never arrive at all.

News clients similarly affect the observed context - some clients deal with
threads better than others, Some people prefer to display their messages in
strict chronological order (in whatever terms that means for their server),
and the message 'right-above' might be way above, or way below whereas some
attempt to do so in a thread-context. Other responses to the original post
may well intervene. Some users also (me, for instance) turn on the "don't
display messages already read" feature - which also means that if I did see
the original post, it's likely no longer visible in my client.

As you note for yourself, however, NObody wants to have to scroll down to
the end of a lengthy post to read the response. Usenet protocol is to
cite JUST those portions of the post(s) to which you are responding,
sufficient to convey the context of your response - but NOT usually the
entire previous post or thread-to-date. (There's a lively debate about
top/bottom/interspersed posting with regard to such responses, but that's
another matter.)