[Geany-devel] Stil of mailing list

[Lex Trotman]

On 13 March 2011 23:36, Thomas Martitz
<thomas.martitz at student.htw-berlin.de> wrote:
> I agree with Frank, I hate unecessary full quotes.
>
>
> On 13.03.2011 03:43, Lex Trotman wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> That assumes that I read all through the full quotes. That's of course not
> the case because I would be reading the same stuff a dozen times. I try to
> ignore them (reading only the actual bits that people are replying to), but
> that means I painfully need to search for new content.

So you are one of the good guys who reads the whole thread before he
comments, but there are lots of comments (including from some of the
main contributors) that "I havn't read the whole thread but...".

Its probably due to lack of time I understand that, but I find this
particularly rude & feel like saying to them, "well I'll read your
comment after you go back and read the thread then comment again", but
that is rude too, so partly in self defence I admit I tend to leave
more context on this list.

>
> IMO it's up to the reader to make sure he's got all background.

I agree totally, but it isn't happening.

>
> Your mails are particularly hard to read, sorry Lex.

No, I apologise for having to make your life harder, but I don't know
how to handle it other than that there is probably some intermediate
ground.

Remember this is a mailing list not an IRC, there are delays and (in
my case +11 hours) time zone differences so correcting comments from
people who comment only based on last post or not having read the half
dozen intermediate one paragraph posts slows the discussion a lot.
And after all we are here to try to work on software, sometimes the
discussion will have large contents.

When there are four or five comments, and each only has one paragraph
you have to either reply to each, and serial posting should also be
frowned on, it inflates the list and again not all the posts will be
read or replies are made before reading following comments.

Trying to copy several people's replies into one mail seems to rarely
work nice.

For example as I write this there are three more posts after yours on
this thread each saying different things with only the paragraph they
are interested in (yes I read them before replying to you), so there
will be serial replies effectively breaking the thread into several
subthreads.  That makes it very hard to keep track of whats going on.

The only other option is to use something other than a mailing list,
where all comments are visible on a web page. See for example
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4221#comment-64884

But that sort of thing needs a host.

Cheers
Lex

>
> Best regards.
>
>
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