[Geany-devel] Stil of mailing list

[Lex Trotman]

Hi all,

I'd like to add a couple of points to Franks excellent comments

On 13 March 2011 05:18, Frank Lanitz <frank at frank.uvena.de> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> Please give me the chance to point to the world famous usenet quoting
> howto at http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
> We are here at an mailing list, but most of the rules apply here also.

This howto is very worthwhile, but one of the problems with this, and
many other lists, is that many people don't read the whole thread, so
if you cut all the old content out you are forcing them to reply
without all the background.  Of course leaving all the content in
makes the mailing much larger and its harder to find the new content.
To combat this learn to use your mailers quoted text hiding features,
and if it doesn't have them, switch to one that does.

Missing content also means that people who want to comment on several
parts of a discussion have to either:

1. go back to the last full post and ignore later comments or

2. reply to lots of separate mails, effectively making several threads
within the thread, which can be very hard to follow or

3. cut and paste several mails into one reply, and at this point most
mailers automatic quote marking breaks down

>
> Reason for this is that I saw a huge number of mails during the last
> days, which included full quotes, not properly formates quotes etc.

Try to let your mailer do the quoting automatically, its much more
precise than mere humans are (assuming its configured right) or switch
to one that does.

>
> Also it appears a number of mailing clients do have a very special
> interpretation of breaking lines after about 70-80 characters.
>

Mailers that break lines without preserving quoting are a real pain,
if you have one of those, please think about re-configuring it or
switching, there are lots of good mailers these days for all
platforms.

> Its not very friendly to the readers of this (and other lists) as its
> complicating reading and understand the content -- in special they
> already have issues on reading much text due e.g. some visual
> impairment or even blindness. Just keep this in mind.
>
> Thanks ;)

+1

Cheers
Lex

>
> Cheers,
> Frank
> --
> http://frank.uvena.de/en/
>
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