On Sunday 07 March 2004 07:38, Philipp Thomas wrote:
And the german suse-linux list does show that things can be different and more pleasant if enough people do agree on certain rules for a mailing list.
I presume that this statement means that the Germans use bottom-posting exclusively, and everyone German is happy. However, while the German list is (just assuming... I don't speak German) populated by posters from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and... (anywhere else?) the SLE list is populated by a much wider sampling of participants, from all over the world. There must easily be 40 countries represented here. I'm not suggesting that TOFU is acceptable, just pointing out that, as a general rule, general rules work better in homogeneous populations than in heterogeneous populations. Just as a worldly example, and please don't take offense, uniform social policies are more likely to work in a country like Sweden (where you could count the number of black, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese citizens on your fingers and toes... and have some fingers and toes left over), while uniform social policies tend to fail grandly in melting-pot countries like the USA. So it is with communities like mailing lists. Continuing as devil's advocate, I noted that somebody compared contrasting posting styles with ignoring the rules of the road. Um, if you ignore the local rules about which side of the road to drive, the result is inevitably death, dismemberment and severe property damage. I don't think that's quite what happens when posters ignore/misunderstand preferences on a mailing list. One approach that deals with such disagreement (on other lists) is that the list-masters make a decision, publish it, and stick to it. So, every new poster gets a copy of the rules, to which they agree, at sign-up time. Every poster gets a monthly, automated reminder, along with other administrivia, in one compact package (that they can filter if they wish). Personally, I find the TOFU/MUFO wars amusing, but almost irrelevant. As some other posters have noted, the real problem is failure to trim and edit when one posts replies. THERE is the main argument against top posting. If you just hit "reply", then your mail program makes a copy of the full post and puts the cursor at the top. If you just start typing, it it's far too easy to forget to trim all that stuff below your own golden words... that's how my occasional accidents happen, though I try to be careful. (I also try to consistently bottom-post in this list). If there's just one or two paragraphs that "need" replying in a message, maybe the best approach (a la KMail) is to just highlight the important text first, then hit "Reply". In that fashion, only the highlighted text is brought into your response. Other mailers should offer that, if they don't already. When I want to reply to several sections of somebody's mail, I make two replies. One has nothing highlighted, so everything is brought into the new (candidate) message and given the proper indents and "> >" attribution marking. The other reply is created by highlighting just a single character in the original post, so that a blank reply candidate is created (but with the headers and threading info intact). Then, I copy and paste the relevant material from the bloated candidate message to the empty one (with all the proper "> >" attribution) and send only the streamlined one. If I remember to erase the "To:" field in the discardable candidate message, then I make it less likely that I'll accidentally send it to the list. If anybody's still reading, I hope that added to the discussion. Regards, Kevin