[Foundation-l] How to reply to a mailing list thread

[MZMcBride]

Chad wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 6:41 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>> Hello --
>> 
>> Some of the people posting to this mailing list don't seem to understand how
>> to write a decent, readable reply to a mailing list thread...
>> 
> 
> What possible good did you see coming from this thread? You
> /knew/ it would produce a bunch of "I agree"s and "I'll post how
> I want"s and go nowhere useful at all.
> 
> Lame.

Life's full of annoyances. After seeing this[1] clusterfuck of a reply, I
felt compelled to point out that the current sloppy and rude practice
exhibited by some people on this mailing list does annoy others. (Looking at
Marcus' other replies, this particular reply seems to be outside the norm,
but it was his reply that sparked my opening post.) Alternately, in the
interest of assuming good faith, it's also conceivable that some people on
this list are simply ignorant of inline replies and clean start replies, and
don't intend to be rude or sloppy.

If people want to continue to leave whatever the hell they please in their
replies, it's their prerogative and Austin has said he's not going to
regulate the bad behavior. But awareness often leads to change. The reply
from you, Chad, was unusually cleaned up and concise. I'll consider that a
minor victory. :-)

Tim Starling wrote:
> Maybe he was not aware of how this subject turned out last time around:

I wasn't aware of those posts, though it's not surprising to read them.
Still, I think it's a point that bears repeating.

MZMcBride

[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-March/057393.html