[Arm-netbook] list posting etiquette

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 3:34 AM, Kyle <kyle at free2.ml> wrote:

> Damn. You know a list has been taken over by posting nazis when entire
> threads get hijacked just to tell anyone who cares to listen that someone
> top posted, and that breaks someone's flow.

 nooo: it means that we have new people whom we need to accommodate
and teach them how to not disrupt communication with over 400 other
people.  as we get new people, that discussion naturally needs to take
place regularly.

> Well, here's the deal. My e-mail
> client is threaded, so I see the whole conversation in order. It just flows
> naturally that way.

 indeed... but you are just one of the 400+ people.  i don't use a
threaded email client; others may use mutt, and so on.

> If I want to read the same messages over and over, all I
> have to do is open them as many times as I want. There is therefore no need
> to quote anything at all, as I have the entire context.

 there is no need to quote anything at all... *for you*, as *you* have
the entire context, and have an email client where it is convenient to
review prior messages very very easily.

 a busy person (one who has hundreds of messages a day) would not have
the time to do that - hence the reason why there are rules about
providing (and cutting unnecessary) context.

> I'm looking at you
> especially, hard-core bottom posters,

 hard-core bottom-posting is just as bad, as is not cutting extraneous context

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> On Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 8:42 PM, "Person B" <person.b at othermail.ext>
> wrote:
>> On Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 8:34 PM, "Person A" <person.a at email.ext> wrote:
>> > On Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 8:32 PM, "Person B" <person.b at othermail.ext>
>> > wrote:
>> > > On Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 8:30 PM, "Person A" <person.a at email.ext>

 this kind of thing - not cutting extraneous context - is *really*
irritating to have to read through.  like the wikipedia page says, and
every netiquette page says, it's really important to remove anything
(but ONLY anything) which is not needed.  the remaining context should
make the ongoing immediate discussion "understandable".  issues that
have already been discussed, resolved and do not need to be repeated
should be removed.

 it's pretty sensible stuff


> I find this list to be quite informative, and I see a lot of good things
> coming in the hopefully not-too-distant future because of the ongoing work
> that is taking place here, as well as on various pages and articles linked
> here. However, post police hijacking threads to tell people they're posting
> wrong, when all they want to do is contribute to the discussion is
> counterproductive at best, has happened 2 to 3 times just on this list in
> the past 24 hours,

 please be patient: we have new people coming in all the time.

> has completely derailed a thread at least once in that
> time and is enough to make people who otherwise have good contributions want
> to leave.

 well, one of the things we don't unfortunately enforce properly is
good subject-line management, which would allow people to select the
topics that they're interested in.  so, i'm going to try to start
doing that and would appreciate people doing the same.

l.