Re: Bottom posting v top posting
On Sun, May 13, 2018 at 09:52:23AM +1000, Brian Salter-Duke wrote: > For a long time, mutters have fought battles and wars to get everybody > to bottom post. It makes a lot of sense, but we have lost every battle > and every war. In a work related environment, top-posting is more common and even encouraged; it makes sense as sometimes you need to reconstruct the whole, pristine chain of communication (for audit reasons, to forward to a third party, etc.). That, I feel, explains the proneness of many users to top-post. > I now only bottom to emails on this list. I also never ever see bottom > posting in all the hundreds of emails I get every week, other than > posts to the mutt lists. Bottom-posting on mailing-lists is still a battle worthy of being fought. I don't nudge anyone (I do when their email is HTML-only), but I keep bottom posting on MLs: trimming+BP saves reading time and is clearer. I hope/expect newcomers to pick out the habit by experiencing how easier it is to navigate a bottom-posted thread.
Re: Bottom posting v top posting
On 13.05.18 15:31, Brian Salter-Duke wrote: > On Sun, May 13, 2018 at 03:03:55PM +1000, Erik Christiansen wrote: > > On 13.05.18 09:52, Brian Salter-Duke wrote: > > > It is time we gave up bottom posting! ... > Eric, I tried to email you direct, but you do not allow that, so I will have > to > send to the list my anger at your post. Please understand that I would have returned it to the list in any event. > Who the hell do you think you are to lecture me in that way? Anger is good in a dangerous situation, but here it does seem to impede understanding. From your fulsome fullquote, I have requoted only the dictatorial challenge in your OP, which caused me to offer up a pin to the balloon of your fantasy. > I have been using mutt for pretty well as long as you have no doubt. I > am perfectly happy to bottom post. I have always bottom posted on the > mutt lists. I understand why the mutt community prefers it. I prefer it. No, you have told us we must abandon our optimal practice in favour of an ignorant fashion. I responded accordingly, in a constructively educational manner, appropriate to the nature of the challenge. > The problem is that nobody outside the mutt community who email me use it. A calmer reading of my post ought to reveal that it is an attempt to help you learn that a difference is not 'a priori' a problem. I write Danish to my relatives, German to some friends, and English where that suits. It is no mark of a developed intellect to be so dogmatic as to insist that various communities must conform to a single norm. If you think carefully, you will observe that in the sentence above, you logically connect the problem with the last pronoun there. That is where you will find the remedy, rather than in attempting to force conformity on disparate communities. > Also, it would not go down well if I tried to educate my research colleagues > at universities all over the world to bottom post. On this list we would ask them to do so. As for elsewhere, I refer you to your sig. > We have had 20 years or so to educate people to bottom post. We have almost > entirely failed. No we have made no attempt to do so outside lists, but you still fail to learn to tolerate difference in other communities. > It turns out that my random sig that I use for this list is highly > appropriate. > I assure you that it really is random. Yes it is ironically appropriate. If only you could learn from it what you have so far failed to learn from gentle prodding of your intellect, then we would be spared further effort to help you man up and accept evident difference. Erik -- Gnothi seauton, the Ancient Greek aphorism "Know thyself", was inscribed in the pronaos (forecourt) of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi according to the Greek periegetic (travelogue) writer Pausanias. The Suda, a tenth century encyclopedia of Greek Knowledge, says it is a warning to pay no attention to the opinion of the multitude.
Re: Bottom posting v top posting
Brian Salter-Duke wrote: Erik Christiansen wrote: Salter-Duke wrote: My partner reads gmail on her phone or tablet. She reads my messages but does not realise that if she scrolls down she can see her message that I replying to. If I had bottom posting, she would never have read my message, thinking that some how she had got her email back again. The use of phones for email alters the game. It is time we gave up bottom posting! Thinking can be a useful path to learning. Is it possible for you to imagine that if you could learn to trim your quotes to the essential minimum of a line or two, then bottom posting works well on most screens, and even on phones if you prefix the whole message with: "For clarity I'm answering in context, see below:" Eric, I tried to email you direct, but you do not allow that, so I will have to send to the list my anger at your post. Who the hell do you think you are to lecture me in that way? This is the kind of response I get from some of my top-posting friends as well. I've stopped that debate in my environment. I like bottom posting and I do it everywhere. I put in the extra work to reformat whole email chains and sometimes people do not want to break it and continue. I also use the hated HTML format to force a proper formatting on their clients. I generate an HTML part for my email, which represents the text part with a fixed width font, a forced width of 82 characters and colored quote lines. Now I can use ASCII drawings and all my friends on their fancy phones and crappy clients can enjoy it. I often get compliments on the style and readability on my emails. And my response then is: Use a proper client and learn about email and every mail will look like this. HTML is not allowed on this list, so here is the HTML part for this mail: https://shell.srv.hagen.coffee/~sdk/textmail.html Best Regards, Stefan -- Stefan Hagen Phone: +49 (0)176 642 925 17 Defender of RFC 1855 | PGP Key in Header.
Re: Bottom posting v top posting
On 13.05.18 09:52, Brian Salter-Duke wrote: > My partner reads gmail on her phone or tablet. She reads my messages but does > not realise that if she scrolls down she can see her message that I replying > to. If I had bottom posting, she would never have read my message, thinking > that some how she had got her email back again. The use of phones for email > alters the game. It is time we gave up bottom posting! The world has an infinite supply of fools who stumble through it, unaware that it is the adaptor who survives. NO, it is not the list community which needs to adapt to one intruder, but the converse. Bottom post, and we will read. Only then can you hope for a reply. Understand that we have t-prot for TOFU protection, and do not need to scroll down as long quotes are compressed. Trim your quotes, not out of consideration for the reader if you lack that, but in order for your reply to be seen and read. Try to learn. It is a prerequisite to becoming adaptable. The first survival tactic is when in Rome, do as they do. We have no problem with you sending inverted messages in other domains. Go your hardest, but to attempt to impose that foolishness on our community is infantile and a symptom of slow learning. Thinking can be a useful path to learning. Is it possible for you to imagine that if you could learn to trim your quotes to the essential minimum of a line or two, then bottom posting works well on most screens, and even on phones if you prefix the whole message with: "For clarity I'm answering in context, see below:" Your partner's ignorance and your failure to compensate do not compel an entire community to pander to your slow learning. Please man up and adapt. Erik
Re: Bottom posting v top posting
On Sun, May 13, 2018 at 03:23:45AM +, Ian Zimmerman wrote: > I also bottom post with some of my best friends who _are_ gmail users, > and they don't object. +1 The key, I've learned, is to teach them about bottom-posting. I have occassionally used bottom-posting with contacts without warning, and that has led to some confusion. I now try to remember to put "see my responses in-line below" as the first line of the message. Some mail clients by default collapse inline responses. I don't know which mail clients they are, but contacts have told me that they just saw an empty email (until I told them to search for how to uncollapse the quoted reply). To me, this is a clear bug in such mail clients, but it's good to know the behavior exists. I think the important thing is to be kind and patient with newcommers, and educate them on why in some situations some people prefer bottom-posting. I do not participate on this list much, but on lyx-users bottom-posting is part of our "list netiquette" [1]. If I see a user who is sticking around for a while, I just kindly remind them that it is part of our list netiquette. If everyone takes turns in patiently reminding newcommers, it is not so much of a hastle and I've found that the newcommers are open to bottom-posting. Scott [1] https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__wiki.lyx.org_FAQ_ListNetiquette&d=DwIBAg&c=pZJPUDQ3SB9JplYbifm4nt2lEVG5pWx2KikqINpWlZM&r=zUqJVM3RY5svAe6ctaxqyrj3k9OQkcL6UzDF3Kn6e0s&m=I0V31ciCHXrUy7R-bTo1iUQ7IQ-O4anaqqzxuRkujCM&s=l3XyQq-DSjJT-wVddDp5jQhsRavz1QC53Zxx3JUIpqQ&e= -- Scott Kostyshak Assistant Professor of Economics University of Florida https://people.clas.ufl.edu/skostyshak/
Re: Bottom posting v top posting
On 2018-05-13 09:52, Brian Salter-Duke wrote: > Posting to this list yesterday and a recent incident with my partner, > prompts me to raise the issue of bottom posting. For a long time, > mutters have fought battles and wars to get everybody to bottom > post. It makes a lot of sense, but we have lost every battle and every > war. I now only bottom post to emails on this list. I also never ever > see bottom posting in all the hundreds of emails I get every week, > other than posts to the mutt lists. I am on some 30+ lists, and I'd estimate bottom posting is the norm on 25. It is true that gmail users are a small minority on all of them. I also bottom post with some of my best friends who _are_ gmail users, and they don't object. But I think they use computers for email, not phones. To sum up, the vision you have of almost everybody using phones may be the future, but is not yet the present, and I resist accelerating the transition. -- Please don't Cc: me privately on mailing lists and Usenet, if you also post the followup to the list or newsgroup. To reply privately _only_ on Usenet and on broken lists which rewrite From, fetch the TXT record for no-use.mooo.com.
Re: Bottom posting v top posting
On Sun, May 13, 2018 at 09:52:23AM +1000, Brian Salter-Duke wrote: > It is time we gave up bottom posting! Just... nope. -- Derek D. Martinhttp://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience. pgpML1LnY4IkP.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: A mutt mailcap problem
On Sat, May 12, 2018 at 11:15:26AM +1000, Brian Salter-Duke wrote: > I select the attachments with 'v', move the cursor down to the > quoted-printable text/html line and hit enter. Now using Mutt 1.8.0 > that menu does not come up. Instead of hitting enter, try typing m . -- Kevin J. McCarthy GPG Fingerprint: 8975 A9B3 3AA3 7910 385C 5308 ADEF 7684 8031 6BDA signature.asc Description: PGP signature
