Date: Mon, 27 May 2002 00:38:51 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> To: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> Cc: rob <rob@pythonemproject.com>, "chat@freebsd.org" <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Bottom-quoting (was Re: My friends were amazed at FreeBSD...) Message-ID: <20020526223851.GA1562@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <15601.25086.46245.903887@guru.mired.org> References: <20020524163603.L81843@lpt.ens.fr> <3CEECD6A.5E9BB6A6@pythonemproject.com> <20020525175149.A69827@lpt.ens.fr> <15601.2665.379231.456776@guru.mired.org> <20020526173949.GA230@lpt.ens.fr> <15601.10022.167754.574044@guru.mired.org> <20020526183504.GA472@lpt.ens.fr> <15601.23130.211488.574573@guru.mired.org> <20020526220340.GA1413@lpt.ens.fr> <15601.25086.46245.903887@guru.mired.org>
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Mike Meyer said on May 26, 2002 at 17:30:22: > > But your recommended solution for clueless newbies -- not quoting at all > > -- makes it totally impossible to follow the thread (without > > consulting archives). That was my point. > > I disagree with your point. Unless you suffer from ADD, it's pretty > easy to keep track of message threads in a conversation you're > following. If you can't do that, any good MUA - or even a mediocre > one - will thread messages for you. What about mail archives? Those are the most important aspect of mailing lists; there are plenty of lists to which I don't subscribe but which I read online. There are clueless newbies who gratuitously change subject lines. They often use broken mail clients which don't include "References:" or "In-Reply-To:" headers, thus making threading impossible. These users are the ones most likely to bottom-quote. If you tell them not to quote at all, their mails now get stripped of all context whatever. Even if their subject lines and headers do supply threading information, it's an annoyance if their message body contains no context. > Even if you don't keep the messages around, the archives will thread > them for you as well. See above. Around 30% of the time I'm unable to follow the thread in an archive, because of broken headers or whatever. > I just think that including the entire text of a message is a bad > habit. Not quoting the message at all isn't a bad habit. Basically that's where we disagree. Quoting in full may be a bad habit, but not quoting at all, I think, is a terrible habit. A message with the subject line "Re: multimedia" and the body saying "But I already did that and it still doesn't work" devoid of context, contains no information whatever. > > On the other hand, bottom-posting is not only very widespread, > > but (in my opinion) not as bad as you paint it. I myself do it when > > mailing other people who do it -- it keeps things more consistent. > > Bottom posting is usually the best way to do things. Typo -- I meant bottom-quoting. - Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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