inclusions keep their `>' leaders, so the `nesting level' of a quotation
is visually apparent.

A few other idiosyncratic quoting styles survive because they are
automatically generated. One particularly ugly one looks like this:

/* Written hh:mm pm Mmm dd, yyyy by user@site in */
/* ---------- "Article subject, chopped to 35 ch" ---------- */

/* End of text from local:group */

It is generated by an elderly, variant news-reading system called
`notesfiles'. The overall trend, however, is definitely away from such
verbosity.

The practice of including text from the parent article when posting a
followup helped solve what had been a major nuisance on USENET: the fact
that articles do not arrive at different sites in the same order.
Careless posters used to post articles that would begin with, or even
consist entirely of, "No, that's wrong" or "I agree" or the like. It
was hard to see who was responding to what. Consequently, around 1984,
new news-posting software evolved a facility to automatically include
the text of a previous article, marked with "> " or whatever the poster
chose. The poster was expected to delete all but the relevant lines.
The result has been that, now, careless posters post articles containing
the *entire* text of a preceding article, *followed* only by "No, that's
wrong" or "I agree".

Many people feel that this cure is worse than the original disease, and
there soon appeared newsreader software designed to let the reader skip