Threadtiquette

Jeff Wilson · 06 Jan 2011, 22:56 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 16:56:25 -0600 (CST)
Subject: (urth) Threadtiquette
In-Reply-To: <476532.56723.qm at web84102.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <476532.56723.qm at web84102.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <eb1e17824129d1bb0db2461b6ea9ff24.squirrel at webmail.prismnet.com>

From:   "DAVID STOCKHOFF" <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
> If only interleaving were so easy. I try to do it but Webmail makes it
> difficult and Thunderbird isn't much better.

I'm doing it in Webmail right now. If Thunderbird is set up properly, it
is not difficult and I do it as often as a dozen times a day with minimal
effort.

> I sometimes resort to dashes,
> and I hope that is effective.
> Of course, I top-post because I am using email, and top-posting is best
> for email, where I don't need to read my own question before I read the
> response.?

This is only true when you never have more than one outstanding exchange
per correspondent-subject, they are not shared outside of exclusive
correspondent pairs, and exchanges are returned within the most reliable
short term memory time-frame.

> It's also plainly the best format for this forum, because no one
> needs to read a poster's original question 6 times while reading the 6
> answers posted in response.?

With the presence of idention characters, they don't have to, they can
immiediately skip to the end of the indented text. However, the indented
text (hopefully trimmed) remains in each reply  because each has roughly
the same chance of being the first one read in a sitting.

And the singular "original question" is an inaccurate characterization of
the majority of reply-able posts; most contain several elements of
discussion of which various combinations may be distilled for addresss by
prudent reply trimmers.

Jeff

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