[ale] OT: please trip your posts

[James Sumners]

I agree, and I change my top, bottom, or inline reply style based on
the context of the email and what the reply requires. But mostly I top
post. Maybe bottom posting every time made sense at one point in time,
but now-a-days it seems a bit silly (given that email/nntp clients
generally hide the previous message).

What grinds my axe is the lack of trimming. I'm not trying to single
anyone out here, it's just the first post I found, by randomly
clicking titles, in a long thread that didn't trim: look at [1]. The
reply contains _three_ previous emails along with every single mailman
forced signature. Trim that crap out! You usually only need to include
the previous email and the "name" part of the previous signature. If
you reply to an email of mine and leave more than "--\nJames Sumners"
in your quote then I claim you've done it wrong.

[1] -- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.ale/88579

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 14:18, Ron Frazier
<atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com> wrote:
> I understand what you're saying.  But, sometimes, the replies are much
> more clear when they're adjacent to the part of the message being
> replied to, ie inline.  On my email client at least, it shows a series
> of vertical bars to the left to indicate when quoting is going on.  I
> just look for the absence of that indicator, and I know where the new
> lines are.  Some email systems use >>> etc.  I really don't like bottom
> posting for replies, but I can see the logic of continuing the trend.
> If people are top posting, the first thing I see when I open up the
> message is the new stuff.  I don't have to scroll down and such.
>
> It seems like we should leave some context in the message, so someone
> jumping into the middle of the thread doesn't have to back for a day or
> two to see what's going on.  I always try to trim off all the old ALE
> automatic sigs and any of my own sigs that got stuck in the middle.
>
> Just my 2 cents.  (Where is the cents symbol on a keyboard?)
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ron


-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59