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

[Anthony]

Was that supposed to be an example of a terrible use of inline posting?  If
so, ha, great job, I couldn't even figure out what was written by you and
what was written by Mr. McBride.

BTW, this is supposed to be an example of a good use of top posting.

But in the end, you're just not going to forcibly change the posting habits
of others, so I've found it best to just learn to deal with them.  Or ignore
them depending on how bad it is.  This post below, I've pretty much ignored
because it wasn't worth trying to sort through who said what.

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 5:58 AM, teun spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 12:41 AM, 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.
>
>  Yes, but the opinion on what makes a readable reply may differ from person
> to person.
>
> >>This makes for far more noise than signal,
>
> True
>
>
> > >>as people wade through six copies of the
> > foundation-l footer
>
>  Footers should of course be kept brief and to the point, else they become
> irritating.. Our current footer can probably be reduced to 1 or 2 lines.
>
> >>or eight old and irrelevant replies trying to find the
> > content of the reply to the previous message.
> >
> > Good practice imho is to leave only the previous text, but delete all
> text
> before the previous message.
> This is easiest when people use top-line posting. But I must confess that I
> have not always done that in the past.
>
>
> > >>The Toolserver wiki has a fantastic page that explains how to reply to
> a
> >
> >>mailing list thread the Right Way.[1] If you suspect you've been Doing It
> >
> >>Wrong, please have a read.
> >
> See my reply further down.
>
> >
> > >>Thanks!
> >
> > >>MZMcBride
> >
> > >>[1] https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette
> > Thank you for providing the link. I think this policy must be discussed,
> as
> > many people will prefer top-line posting, as shown by its popularity on
> this
> > mailing list.. Inline posting, as demonstrated by this reply, may well
> > obscure the orginal message.
> >
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