** Sometime around 21:37 -0400 08/23/02, murr rhame sent everyone: > >I find top-quoting extremely annoying on most mailing lists.
Based on your message, I believe you actually mean "top-posting," not "top-quoting" -- in which case, I agree with you completely. >A >$ub$criber typically quotes back an entire article, adds a few >lines of their own to the top, and sends the whole thing back to >the list. This makes threads difficult to follow when $ub$cribed >in individual post mode. The dige$ts can become nearly >indecipherable. Agreed on all points. It is for these reasons, plus the fact that having *some* subscribers top-post and other subscribers bottom-post (or what I refer to as "threaded posting") quickly renders the thread completely indecipherable, even in MAIL mode, that we have recently commenced a Jihad To Enforce Threaded Posting(tm) on all of our mailing lists. We've currently rolled it out on a trial basis to only a couple of lists, but so far the response seems to be better than expected. (Note that I expected roughly *zero* change in subscribers' posting habits, so any positive change is "better than expected.") FWIW, I blame the Bane Of Top-Posting on Microsoft and Outlook [Express]. :-) >Fortunately, my lists all use a footers that >include instructions for un$ub$cribing, the user's $ub$cribed >email address and other info. I've set up a filter that looks >for some of the strings in the footers which are very unlikely to >be mentioned in the body of a reply. If a $ub$criber blindly >quotes back the whole article, including the footers, their post >is rejected and they receive a polite email notifying them of the >rejection and describing how one should use quotes on a mailing >list. Wish I had thought of this years ago. A good idea, if one uses footers. We use RFC2369-style List-X headers instead. We could use footers in addition to List-X headers, but footers have proven to be annoying to the majority of subscribers, and effective primarily in cases where the subscriber is sufficiently heads-up to not need them, anyway. Speaking of RFC 2369 ... does anyone know of any mail clients that actually use the List-X headers to provide, for example, an "Unsubscribe From Mailing List" button on the client's UI? I (as many) was hoping to see at least _some_ adoption of the standard, but I'm not aware of any mail clients that have implemented it. REQUEST: If it has been implemented in Outlook/OE, please don't tell me; I have a long-standing dislike of that particular mail client(s), and I certainly don't want something as lame as reason to come between me and my personal pet peeves. Mucho mahalo. - Vince P.S. -- The observant reader will note that this message posted to the list just fine, and was quite easily read, without resorting to the annoying and unnecessary substitution of dollar signs ($) for the letter "s" in words like "subscriber," "digest," etc. Nor is the substitution of the letter "z" any better. </editorial_comment>
