NYCkayaker Knotty threads

[mjamesone at aol.com]

 Rsk,
 
 "...The default quote format and cursor placement of many popular e-mail applications, such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail, encourages top-posting. Microsoft has had a significant influence on top-posting by the ubiquity of its software; its e-mail and newsreader software top-posts by default, and in several cases makes it difficult not to top-post; many users have accepted this as a de facto standard..."
 
 This has always been my understanding of "top posting" which appears to differ from your sources. To be clear, I'm not talking about "bumping up" a thread, but the convention of placing the reply above the parent thread, as I am doing now. You will note that this source gives both the pro's and con's of "top posting" so maybe it's not so black and white and the convention of what was isn't necessarily what is now. I also agree that some editing of the parent thread is often in order but not always as the editorial license one might take in editing an opposing point of view can often mislead a discussion. Complete info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting
 
 Like yourself, I'll go quiet after this as well. That said, what better day for threads like this than when temps on the Hudson are in the teens :)
 
 Be well.
 
 -- Michael
    
 -----Original Message-----
 From: rsk at rockandwater.net
 To: nyckayaker at rockandwater.net
 Sent: Fri, 26 Jan 2007 11:30 AM
 Subject: Re: NYCkayaker Knotty threads
 
  [ I am sooooo gonna hate myself for wading into this.  But it's either
pontificate on this or go another couple of rounds with a disk drive
that's resisting attempts to make it work...so I think I'll borrow the
soapbox for a minute, then go look for a crowbar.  Or maybe a mallet.
But either way I'll go back to being quiet after this. ]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 06:38:31PM -0500, mjamesone at aol.com wrote:
> On the other hand, not including the reply chain -- or over editing
> of replies -- can often leave the reader at a loss as to the meaning and
> context of the current reply. As long as the reply appears at the top,
> it's easy enough to skip the rest.

I think you're missing the point.  Both top-posting and full-quoting
have been considered very rude since I started on the 'net -- and that
was 27 years ago, so the convention predates that.

And as the original poster pointed out, it's NOT easy to skip the rest
when one is reading the list as a digest.  Moreover, including all that
material over and over and over again bloats the digest but adds no value.
It also makes it makes it more difficult to search both digests and the
list archives.

Consider that not everyone has a high-speed or flat-rate connection; some
people are on dialup, and some pay by the byte.  This slows down their
mail delivery and/or costs them more money -- again, for no added value.

Consider that some people have mail quotas on their accounts, and so
threads which include the same text over and over again chew up space
that could be better used.

Consider that some anti-spam filters which examine content begin to raise
their little digital eyebrows when they keep seeing the same content
over and over again in messages that claim to be from different people.

Consider that not everyone uses the same operating system that you do
or the same mail client.  What is easy for you may not be so for them,
and vice versa.   This is one reason why mailing list messages need
to be tailored to the needs of the many, not the one.

Consider that it only takes a few seconds to edit a message down to those
portions that need to be reproduced to provide context -- deleting in
the process not only irrelevant text but boilerplate such as signatures
and mailing list headers/footers.  Those who will not take that time are
saying to all their fellow list-members "my time is worth more than all
of yours combined".

And so on.

These are [some of] the reasons why the conventions of email netiquette have
developed.  They're meant to make things work for everyone, and to avoid
wasting system/network resources as well as human time.

    [ I'm on a lot, and I do mean, a LOT, of mailing lists.
    I conservatively estimate that 80% of the traffic across all of
    them is superfluous.  The includes excessive quoted material,
    boilerplate legalese, overly-long signatures, HTML markup,
    and other cruft.  Some of those lists have tens of thousands
    of members.  The aggregate waste is appalling. ]

So while I wrote the Miss Mailers FAQ in a smartass tone, it was my
hope that people would read it -- and read the documents it references,
some of which aren't so glib -- and learn from all of them.

So my request is that you (generic "you", not just you in particular) go
read it and then try to put it into practice as your way of helping the
entire Internet function just a little bit better.

    ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/faqs/mail/miss-mailers

And it may even make you laugh.

---Rsk
**********************************************************************
The NYCKayaker mailing list is hosted by www.rockandwater.net, and is a public 
service offered to the kayaking community by the Hudson River Watertrail 
Association. Learn more about HRWA at www.hrwa.org

To unsubscribe or change delivery options:
http://www.rockandwater.net/mailman/listinfo/nyckayaker
   
________________________________________________________________________
Check out the new AOL.  Most comprehensive set of free safety and security tools, free access to millions of high-quality videos from across the web, free AOL Mail and more.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.rockandwater.net/pipermail/nyckayaker/attachments/20070126/5b7866f9/attachment.html