On Fri, 29 Jan 2021 at 06:31, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 2021-01-29 at 17:59 +1030, Tim via users wrote:
> On Thu, 2021-01-28 at 16:49 -0800, Samuel Sieb wrote:
[...]
> Or, put another way, there's a very good reason why the long-
> established way to participate in a mailing list is quote the salient
> bits of the prior email and directly reply to individual sentences or
> paragraphs right underneath them. So that readers know what answers go
> with which questions.
>
> It's called interspersed replies.
Many people's first email user agent is MS Outlook which encourages
top posting by opening a blank section above the quoted message.
When Outlook was introduced at work I had to put a line at the top:
"See responses below" or people would think I had made an empty reply.
>
> It's NOT called bottom posting, which is merely the opposite of top
> posting, where someone replies in one great slab below (bottom) or
> above (top) the post. Either way is not helpful to understanding a
> message.
Well put. This HyperKitty brokenness of not quoting in replies is
becoming a real annoyance. IMHO the only potential advantage in having
a web-based interface to the mailing list is if it encourages people to
respect the same conventions, which some webmail users seem to have
trouble with judging by the amount of top-posting we see. Otherwise
what's the point?
People tend to follow patterns established in their early training. In forums
for cross-platform applications there are now reports that a command-line
program "doesn't work" because nothing happens when the user clicks on
the program in the file browser as well as people asking how to add the
programs to menus.
George N. White III
_______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
