On Sun, 2010-10-10 at 15:40 -0600, Petrus de Calguarium wrote: > Has anyone ever noticed that gmail (and likely a lot of other online > email services and desktop software) opens a gap at the top for typing > the response? That doesn't mean you have to type there, it just means start working on the message from there. Whether that be typing some pre-amble, starting to delete quotes, or whatever... If it dumped the cursor at the bottom, that'd encourage people, even more, to not bother to delete extraneous quoted crap from their message. > this particular posting is a prime example of the disadvantage of > bottom-posting. One has to scroll and scroll and scroll all the way to > the very, very bottom before one can read what was just written. Which is why interspersed, interleaved, or "usenet" style quoting, is generally preferred (as per my reply, now - remove crap, quote bits, directly reply under that bit, move onto the next quoted bit, rinse, lather, repeat). And as explained in the list guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines#Proper_posting_style Unfortunately, lots of people mistakenly call that "bottom posting," when it's not (bottom posting is quoting a huge lump, and writing your entire reply below the quote - the exact opposite of top posting). And calling it the wrong thing causes people to bottom post when they should intersperse. When someone actually means interspersed/interleaved quoting, then they should call it that. Don't use the wrong terminology. > I am reading this in knode, a dedicated news reader. Perhaps your > system will display this differently, but I see post after post > prefixed with >>> and no threading. If you're talking about the message list. Yes, we've all seen lots of messages that aren't threaded, because one of the respondents used broken software. That, or lazy people replying to the wrong post, instead of the one that they should do. e.g. They'll read ten messages in a thread, hit reply on the last one they read, but actually be responding to something three messages back. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
