On Wednesday 09 March 2005 03:39 pm, Brad Bourn wrote:
On Wednesday 09 March 2005 01:39 pm, Carlos E. R. wrote:
rfc1855, Netiquette Guidelines.
and in this doc it states that you must use bottom posted trim quoted reply's on suse-linux-e@suse.com?
suse-linux-e@suse.com is a mailing list. The *convention* on mailing lists is to bottom post and trim quotes. No, it's not a rule, and you're free to break it. You then look like an idiot. As someone said just a few days ago, "When in Rome, do as Romans do". Most of the people on this list behave according to decades-old nettiquite rules. Therefore, when here, it's preferable to behave as everone else does - acting differently (top-posting) will lose you more than it will gain. The only reason to do so is if you're a stubborn moron. Feel free to be a stubborn moron, I suppose, but don't be surprised if you're treated as a stubborn moron. :) (presently, I'm leaning towards just "stubborn"). [...]
In fact I see them more often than not answered by just as knowlegable top-posters,
This is an oxymoron. The knowledgable people follow the list conventions. [...]
It has been my experience both relying on the open-source community and contributing to it for my living for the past 5 years since i was brought to the light, that it is easier to navigate search results in google to find what your looking for when people top-post and full quote. you can usually find the whole conversation in one place.
So, when reading, you prefer to start at the end of the conversation and read backwards? That is opposite of the convention used in much of the Western world. Would you also prefer to read right to left? I've found that, while making my living in the Open Source community for the last 10 years, it's easier to read bottom-quoted mesages on web archives. I've been doing it for twice as long, so my opinion is twice as important. So there. :) Regardless, breaking conventions in order to accommodate poorly-designed mail archives is just bad practice. There exist several quality mail archive systems that display a full thread above or below the message being read. I find that type of system combined with bottom-posted, trimmed replies to be more useful, as sometimes more than one person contributes to a thread, and therefore the whole thread will not be included in a single message even with bandwidth-wasting full quotes and/or top-posting. [...]
Bottom line is that middle-posting and extensive trimming is the worst.
Contextual quoting and in-line replying is occasionally very useful. Such as in this message (and your message to which I'm replying).
takes up too much space/speed? give me a break! this is text!
Everyone in the world has 1.5Mb uncapped downloads and 2GHz machines with 22" monitors and 1.5GB RAM, so why optimize anything? Oh, wait, lots of those "newbies" that are "so important" are also on modems, sometimes even in places where they have to pay per-minute charges. Oh, and the contraction for "you are" is "you're". "Your" means something else. HTH, --Danny, who doesn't understand why it's so difficult for some people to just follow the damned convention - bitching isn't gonna change anything