On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 1:48 PM, jnewman <wineforum-user@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Mark Knecht wrote: > > > > I've been receiving a lot of emails where all I see is a statement > > from the person posting in (I assume) the forum but not quoting any of > > the test that he or she is responding to. This makes it pretty much > > impossible for me to say much of anything in context so I'm just > > deleting these without much attention. > > > > So far today it seems like this must be at least 50% of the traffic. > > > > Are others seeing this also? Is anything about this caused on my end? > > > > If this is happening because the default in the forum is to not > > quote the previous part of the thread I can completely understand > > that. That's the way a forum should work since you can see the post > > immediately above. However if that sort of post in the forum is sent > > to the email list without any context it's almost useless here I > > think. > > > This is a fundamental difference between Forums and the mailing list. In the forum, replies are always shown in ascending order by post time, so it is not necessary to quote a post above it. > > Mailing list users could work around this by configuring your email client to show posts in a threaded view. Thunderbird supports this. GMail is threaded by default so that much is more or less in place here already. However when a newbie from the forums sends a one liner with no context it's difficult to know what he's talking about, especially if I haven't saved the email thread. think about someone responding to a forum thread that's been quiet for months. I'm going down a path here of trying to learn more about Wine so that I can help out a bit. I offered to help with Dan's wine-newbies list idea but if that doesn't happen I'll still try to help out as I can. However it's pretty hard the way things are working right now. I think I answered someone's post this morning, presumably from the forums, and got a response beck from him that sounded like I'd done something wrong because I hadn't read the forum thread. One idea I have would be that in emails originated IN THE FORUM ONLY to automatically add an HTML link pointing readers on this list back to the forum thread. That way we'd have an easy way to get into the forum thread if we chose to and it would only be one line in the email we receive. It could be something like a context sensitive signature added to the email by the forum software. If the software can do that then no person has to do anything and at least we can link the two together better. Just an idea. > > Ahh, the joys of merging two distinct discussion communities into one pot. Who's idea was this again? > ;-) I don't remember... ;-) Cheers, Mark
