Top-posting &c. (was Re: [ANNC] pybotwar-0.8)

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:40 AM, Ramchandra Apte <manian...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16 August 2012 21:00, Mark Lawrence <bream...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> and "bottom" reads better than "top"
>>
> Look you are the only person complaining about top-posting.
> GMail uses top-posting by default.
> I can't help it if you feel irritated by it.

I post using gmail, and I just delete two blank lines at the top and
go down the bottom to type. But on the way down, I also trim quoted
text, so people don't have to download and read the entire thread for
every new post. It's not difficult, you should give it a try some
time!

And FWIW, I add my voice to those who prefer to read replies
underneath the original text. Even if Mark were the only person vocal
enough to complain, you can still rest assured that there are many
more who agree. You've now heard from quite a few regular posters;
there are probably several *hundred* lurkers who feel the same way,
but do not post (possibly because they cannot). Also, these mails get
archived all over the internet, so a generation not yet born can read
and be either enlightened or irritated, as the case may be.

ChrisA

[Madison May]

> And FWIW, I add my voice to those who prefer to read replies
>
> underneath the original text. Even if Mark were the only person vocal
>
> enough to complain, you can still rest assured that there are many
>
> more who agree. You've now heard from quite a few regular posters;
>
> there are probably several *hundred* lurkers who feel the same way,
>
> but do not post (possibly because they cannot). Also, these mails get
>
> archived all over the internet, so a generation not yet born can read
>
> and be either enlightened or irritated, as the case may be.
>
>
>
> ChrisA

As a lurker, I agree completely with Chris's sentiments.

[Madison May]

> And FWIW, I add my voice to those who prefer to read replies
>
> underneath the original text. Even if Mark were the only person vocal
>
> enough to complain, you can still rest assured that there are many
>
> more who agree. You've now heard from quite a few regular posters;
>
> there are probably several *hundred* lurkers who feel the same way,
>
> but do not post (possibly because they cannot). Also, these mails get
>
> archived all over the internet, so a generation not yet born can read
>
> and be either enlightened or irritated, as the case may be.
>
>
>
> ChrisA

[rusi]

On Aug 17, 3:36 am, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:40 AM, Ramchandra Apte <maniandra...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > On 16 August 2012 21:00, Mark Lawrence <breamore...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> >> and "bottom" reads better than "top"
>
> > Look you are the only person complaining about top-posting.
> > GMail uses top-posting by default.
> > I can't help it if you feel irritated by it.
>
> I post using gmail,

If you register on the mailing list as well as google groups, you can
then use googlegroups.
Thereafter appropriately cutting out the unnecessary stuff is easy

[Jurko Gospodnetić]

Hi.

> As a lurker, I agree completely with Chris's sentiments.

+1

Best regards,
Jurko Gospodnetić

[Ulrich Eckhardt]

I that Outlook & Co are guilty. That and the fact that few people even
think about this. Even today that makes sense, because it provides an
exact context. Without that, you wouldn't be able to really understand
what exactly a person is referring to. Also, it helps people to
structure their thoughts better.

If the above paragraph doesn't make sense to you, see it interleaved
below for enlightenment. ;)


Am 17.08.2012 07:19, schrieb Dennis Lee Bieber:
> I also tend to blame M$ (Outlook and variants) for this tendency to
> quote everything and top-post -- Outlook makes it almost impossible
> to do a trim&interleave response style.

I that Outlook & Co are guilty. That and the fact that few people even
think about this.


> Including everything as a trailing quote may be okay in an office
> environment, where it serves more as a photocopy included with an paper
> mail response. But anyone "raised" on 2400bps dial-up on a service that
> charged by the minute (GEnie, Compuserve, et al) rapidly learned to use
> as a log-in/pull/log-off/read-reply/log-in/send system, and to remove as
> much $$ quoted text as possible.

Even today that makes sense, because it provides an exact context.
Without that, you wouldn't be able to really understand what exactly a
person is referring to. Also, it helps people to structure their
thoughts better.


I tend to disagree with the bandwidth argument, which is obsolete. To
me, it's more about communication efficiency and it's only one possible
way to achieve that.

Uli

[Grant Edwards]

On 2012-08-16, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 1:40 AM, Ramchandra Apte <manian...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 16 August 2012 21:00, Mark Lawrence <bream...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> and "bottom" reads better than "top"
>>
>> Look you are the only person complaining about top-posting.

That may have been true -- in this thread -- so far.

>> GMail uses top-posting by default. I can't help it if you feel
>> irritated by it.

If you don't care whether or not people read your posts, go ahead and
top-post. FWIW, you can make up your own private character encoding
and language and post in that if you want. But, if your goal is to
communicate effectively with others, then proper formatting and
editing is A Good Thing(TM).

> I post using gmail, and I just delete two blank lines at the top and
> go down the bottom to type.

[...]

> And FWIW, I add my voice to those who prefer to read replies
> underneath the original text.

Same here. I often skip reading top-posted articles entirely, since I
don't really care to take the time to start reading at the bottom,
working my up, trying to figure out exactly what the poster is
replying or referring to in the blob of context-free text at the top.

--
Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! I guess you guys got
at BIG MUSCLES from doing too
gmail.com much STUDYING!

[rusi]

On Aug 17, 10:19 am, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Aug 2012 15:42:54 -0700 (PDT), Madison May
> <worldpeaceagentforcha...@gmail.com> declaimed the following in
> gmane.comp.python.general:

>
>
>
> > As a lurker, I agree completely with Chris's sentiments.
>

>         I've been holding back on quoting the "netiquette RFC"... I also

> tend to blame M$ (Outlook and variants) for this tendency to quote
> everything and top-post -- Outlook makes it almost impossible to do a
> trim&interleave response style.
>

>         Including everything as a trailing quote may be okay in an office
> environment, where it serves more as a photocopy included with an paper
> mail response.

I was in a corporate environment for a while. And carried my
'trim&interleave' habits there.
And got gently scolded for seeming to hide things!!

Just mentioning that there are cultures other than this one.

Of course, "Do in Rome as romans do" is universally sound advice,
(with Rome suitably parameterized), so its best to follow the
netiquette of the forum you are using.

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 09:36:04 -0700, rusi wrote:

> I was in a corporate environment for a while. And carried my
> 'trim&interleave' habits there.
> And got gently scolded for seeming to hide things!!

Corporate email users are generally incompetent at email no matter what
email conventions you use. I cannot tell you the number of times I have
emailed somebody, top-posted, explicitly said "We have three questions
blocking progress, please answer all three", asked the three questions in
clearly numbered bullet points... and got an answer back to the first and
not even an acknowledgement of the other two.

Nevertheless, I've taken up writing at the top of emails

"My replies are interleaved with your questions which are shown starting
with > symbols."

to make it obvious that they should keep reading.

It *is* possible to top-post and communicate effectively, it just takes a
LOT more work, and the sorts of people who prefer top posting simply
don't do it. Top-posting only works for shallow communication: simple
questions, simple replies, and shallow threads, two or three replies at
most. It's good for emails like:

Subject: Meet you at the pub on Friday afternoon?

See u there!!!

--- Original Message ---

Hey bro, want to catch up for drinks at the pub on Friday?


but lousy for long *discussion* threads where people are replying to
potentially dozens of separate issues within a single email.

To communicate effectively in email, you need to assume that your reader
has forgotten the context of your reply, since they may have. They are
probably dealing with dozens of other similar emails. A thread may go on
for a week, or the question may have been asked a month ago and the reply
only sent now. In long discussions, subjects may drift so that the
subject line is no longer appropriate, or it may be a generic subject
line.

In interleaved email, the quoted text acts as a refresher of previous
content. If you don't interleave, you are responsible for adding context.
Rather than:

"Sort the list first."

write something like:

"Your binary search is failing because the list is unsorted. Sort the
list first."

That's a trivial example. In practice this becomes a PITA real fast,
which is why top-posting discourages discussion in depth and encourages
short, shallow, context-free replies.

> Just mentioning that there are cultures other than this one.

There are cultures that marry five year old girls to sixty year old men,
cultures that treat throwing acid in the faces of women as acceptable
behaviour, cultures that allow war heroes to die of hunger and cold
homeless in the street, and cultures that top-post. What's your point?

> Of course, "Do in Rome as romans do" is universally sound advice, (with
> Rome suitably parameterized), so its best to follow the netiquette of
> the forum you are using.

Unless you think you can change the culture of Rome by example.


--
Steven

[Zero Piraeus]

:

On 17 August 2012 21:43, Steven D'Aprano

<steve+comp....@pearwood.info> wrote:
> There are cultures that marry five year old girls to sixty year old men,
> cultures that treat throwing acid in the faces of women as acceptable
> behaviour, cultures that allow war heroes to die of hunger and cold
> homeless in the street, and cultures that top-post. What's your point?

+1 QOTW

-[]z.

[Ben Finney]

+1. A message which is top-posted is a fairly reliable indicator that
the message wasn't written with much consideration for the reader, so I
tend to just skip those messages.

If you don't care whether your messages are read, continue to top-post.

If you want to show that you've made efforts to make your message more
readable, use interleaved replies and trim off material to which you're
not replying <URL:http://brooksreview.net/2011/01/interleaved-email/>.

--
\ “We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't |
`\ scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what |
_o__) annoys me.” —Jack Handey |
Ben Finney

[Grant Edwards]

On 2012-08-17, rusi <rusto...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I was in a corporate environment for a while. And carried my
> 'trim&interleave' habits there. And got gently scolded for seeming to
> hide things!!

I have, rarely, gotten the opposite raction from "corporate e-mailers"
used to top posting. I got one comment something like "That's cool
how you interleaved your reponses -- it's like having a real
conversation."

--
Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! Somewhere in Tenafly,
at New Jersey, a chiropractor
gmail.com is viewing "Leave it to
Beaver"!

[rusi]

On Aug 18, 8:34 pm, Grant Edwards <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> On 2012-08-17, rusi <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I was in a corporate environment for a while.  And carried my
> > 'trim&interleave' habits there. And got gently scolded for seeming to
> > hide things!!
>
> I have, rarely, gotten the opposite raction from "corporate e-mailers"
> used to top posting.  I got one comment something like "That's cool
> how you interleaved your reponses -- it's like having a real
> conversation."

Well sure. If I could civilize people around me, God (or Darwin?)
would give me a medal.
Usually though, I find it expedient to remember G.B. Shaw's:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one
persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends
on the unreasonable man."

and then decide exactly how (un)reasonable to be in a given context.

[No claims to always succeed in these calibrations :-) ]
And which brings me back to the question of how best to tell new folk
about the netiquette around here.

I was once teaching C to a batch of first year students. I was
younger then and being more passionate and less reasonable, I made a
rule that students should indent their programs correctly.
[Nothing like python in sight those days!]

A few days later there was a commotion. Students appeared in class
with black-badges, complained to the head-of-department and what not.
Very perplexed I said: "Why?! I allowed you to indent in any which way
you like as long as you have some rules and follow them." I imagined
that I had been perfectly reasonable and lenient!

Only later did I realize that students did not understand
- how to indent
- why to indent
- what program structure meant

So when people top-post it seems reasonable to assume that they dont
know better before jumping to conclusions of carelessness, rudeness,
inattention etc.

For example, my sister recently saw some of my mails and was mystified
that I had sent back 'blank mails' until I explained and pointed out
that my answers were interleaved into what was originally sent!
Clearly she had only ever seen (and therefore expected) top-posted
mail-threads. Like your 'corporate-emailer' she found it damn neat,
after the initiation.

Whether such simple unfamiliarity with culture is the case in the
particular case (this thread's discussion) I am not sure. Good to
remember Hanlon's razor...

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 18 Aug 2012 10:27:10 -0700, rusi wrote:

> For example, my sister recently saw some of my mails and was mystified
> that I had sent back 'blank mails' until I explained and pointed out
> that my answers were interleaved into what was originally sent!

No offence to your sister, who I'm sure is probably a really great person
and kind to small animals and furry children, but didn't she, you know,
*investigate further* upon seeing something weird, namely a "blank" email?

As in, "Gosh, dearest brother has sent me an email without saying
anything. That's weird. I hope he's alright? Maybe there's something a
bit further down? Or a funny picture of a cat at the end? Or something? I
better scroll down a bit further and see."

I'm not talking about "complicated tech stuff" like View > Message Source
and trying to determine whether perhaps the MIME type is broken and
there's an invisible attachment. I'm talking about almost the simplest
thing in the friggin' world, *scrolling down and looking at what's there*.
The software equivalent of somebody handing you a "blank" piece of paper
and turning it around to see if maybe there's something on the back.

Because that's what I do, and I don't think I'm some sort of hyper-
evolved mega-genius with a brain the size of a planet, I'm just some guy.
Nobody needed to tell me "Hey dummy, the text you are looking for is a
bit further down, keep reading." I just looked on my own, and saw the
text on my own, and actually read it without being told to, and a little
light bulb went on over my head and I went "Wow! People can actually
write stuff in between other stuff! How did they do that?"

Now sure, I make allowances for 70 year olds who have never touched a
computer before and have to ask "What's a scroll bar?" and "How do I use
this mousey-pointer thing?" I assume your sister has minimal skills like
"can scroll" and "knows how to read".

I'm not sure which is worse -- that perhaps I *am* some sort of mega-
genius and keep overestimating the difficulty of scroll-down-and-read for
normal people, or that others have such short attention spans that
anything that they can't see immediately in front of them might as well
not exist. Either thought is rather depressing.



--
Steven

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 5:15 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp....@pearwood.info> wrote:
> The software equivalent of somebody handing you a "blank" piece of paper
> and turning it around to see if maybe there's something on the back.

Straight out of a Goon Show, that is. Heh.

ChrisA

[pyt...@bdurham.com]

Hi Steve,

> I don't think I'm some sort of hyper-evolved mega-genius with a brain the size of a planet, I'm just some guy.

Based on reading thousands of your posts over the past 4 years, I'll
have to respectfully disagree with you on your assertion that you are
not some hyper-evolved genius with a brain the size of a planet. :)

I've learned a ton from reading your posts - so much so that I think my
brain is getting heavier[1].

Thank you and cheers!
Malcolm

>From a recent thread on this mailing list (hilarious)
http://onceuponatimeinindia.blogspot.in/2009/07/hard-drive-weight-increasing.html

[rusi]

On Aug 19, 12:15 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve
+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote:
> is probably a really great person and kind to small animals and furry children, but...

ROFL!

The first we're all familiar with.

Furry children?

Something to do with heads the size of a planet?

[Chris Angelico]

Or it's a Wonka-esque "Wait. Scratch that. Reverse it" moment.

Of course Steven is a bit egotistical. That sort of happens when
you're better than 95% of the human population of this planet.

ChrisA

[Mark Lawrence]

On 20/08/2012 08:46, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 5:31 PM, rusi <rusto...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Or it's a Wonka-esque "Wait. Scratch that. Reverse it" moment.
>
> Of course Steven is a bit egotistical. That sort of happens when
> you're better than 95% of the human population of this planet.
>
> ChrisA
>

He's a long way to go to catch up with me then :)

--
Cheers.

Mark Lawrence.

[Jean-Michel Pichavant]

Zero Piraeus wrote:
> :
>
> On 17 August 2012 21:43, Steven D'Aprano

> <steve+comp....@pearwood.info> wrote:
>
>> There are cultures that marry five year old girls to sixty year old men,
>> cultures that treat throwing acid in the faces of women as acceptable
>> behaviour, cultures that allow war heroes to die of hunger and cold
>> homeless in the street, and cultures that top-post. What's your point?
>>
>

> +1 QOTW
>
> -[]z.
>
We're closer to the +1 godwin point

JM

[Prasad, Ramit]

> > I also tend to blame M$ (Outlook and variants) for this tendency to
> > quote everything and top-post -- Outlook makes it almost impossible
> > to do a trim&interleave response style.
>
> I that Outlook & Co are guilty. That and the fact that few people even
> think about this.

Nonsense, I post only from Outlook. You can do it and it is not hard.
It is just requires a little effort.

Top posting makes more sense in a corporate setting for a couple reasons.
Seeing the exact email trail rather than what someone considers "relevant"
context can be very useful. Not to mention that frequently corporate email
is more like slow instant messaging; I need less context (e.g.
conversation history) and get all the information I need from what the
sender is writing.

I find inline (and to a lesser extent bottom) posting to be a mixed bag.
Some people do it well and it is easy to read, but there are others who
do not make it as easy (for me) to read. Lots of posts are not trimmed
enough, or trimmed too much.

I am not advocating top-posting. I just think that different styles are
good for different cases/environments. Blame the person, not the
application for having poor habits and/or being inconsiderate of the
community. :)

Ramit

P.S. Ironically, I do blame Outlook for making it hard (impossible?)
to find/see the 80 char boundary.
This email is confidential and subject to important disclaimers and
conditions including on offers for the purchase or sale of
securities, accuracy and completeness of information, viruses,
confidentiality, legal privilege, and legal entity disclaimers,
available at http://www.jpmorgan.com/pages/disclosures/email.

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2012 22:49:24 +0000, Prasad, Ramit wrote:

>> > I also tend to blame M$ (Outlook and variants) for this tendency to
>> > quote everything and top-post -- Outlook makes it almost impossible
>> > to do a trim&interleave response style.
>>
>> I that Outlook & Co are guilty. That and the fact that few people even
>> think about this.
>
> Nonsense, I post only from Outlook. You can do it and it is not hard. It
> is just requires a little effort.
>
> Top posting makes more sense in a corporate setting for a couple
> reasons. Seeing the exact email trail rather than what someone considers
> "relevant" context can be very useful.

That's what your email archive, and the threading information in the
email headers, is for.

When people used to correspond by paper mail, they did not photocopy the
entire past correspondence and staple it to the back of their letter. And
then the person responding didn't photocopy the photocopies and post them
back with his response. If somebody did, that would be stupid -- did he
think the sender posted the originals and didn't keep a copy?

If there was a business requirement to make copies of copies of copies,
people would have done it. But there wasn't, and it was stupid and costly
and so they didn't.

With email, it's less costly, but it's equally stupid. Email programs
reduce the cost of making and posting those photocopies to essentially
zero, at least zero for the person pressing Send.

It might be almost free for the sender, but it's still stupid. Nobody
looks at those deep email trails. When you want to find out the order of
correspondence, you sort your mail folder by Thread or by Date and look
at it there, not by trying to interpret the copies of copies of copies of
past discussions. Nobody uses them. They just bulk up email and get in
the way of communication and make searching for relevant emails harder.

I've had to dig through email archives for legal purposes, looking for
evidence in legal cases, and having to read past copies of copies of
copies of copies (down to ten or twelve levels deep!!!) makes the process
much, much, much harder than it should be.

Top posting in and of itself is not always bad. But the practice of
leaving copies of copies of copies in the body of the email is beyond
stupid. If they were *attachments* that could be ignored when printed,
that would be *almost* sane, but putting them in the body of the email is
insane.

> Not to mention that frequently
> corporate email is more like slow instant messaging; I need less context
> (e.g. conversation history) and get all the information I need from
> what the sender is writing.

In my experience, if you ask a question in corporate environments by
email, you're lucky to get an answer within a day. Slow indeed.



--
Steven

[Alex Strickland]

On 2012/08/17 12:42 AM, Madison May wrote:

> As a lurker, I agree completely with Chris's sentiments.

I too, but I'd prefer something top-posted than have to skip through 38
pages of quoted e-mail to get to a (generally) 1 liner at the bottom.

--
Regards
Alex

[Steven D'Aprano]

+1000

People with Hotmail accounts used to be known as "Metoobees" because of
their tendency to reply to long posts with a single line at the very end,
"Me too!".


--
Steven

[Ulrich Eckhardt]

Am 21.08.2012 00:49, schrieb Prasad, Ramit:
>>> I also tend to blame M$ (Outlook and variants) for this tendency to
>>> quote everything and top-post -- Outlook makes it almost impossible
>>> to do a trim&interleave response style.
>>

>> I [think] that Outlook & Co are guilty. That and the fact that few

>> people even think about this.
>
> Nonsense, I post only from Outlook. You can do it and it is not hard.
> It is just requires a little effort.

A good tool would reduce the effort and guide users, like e.g. giving
them a hint if they leave the whole mail they're replying to as copy.
Several corporate email solutions (like MS Outlook/Exchange) put very
little emphasis on communication efficiency but only on eye-candy
features. Their popularity and the resulting influence on people has
caused decay in average communication culture, and that is what I blame
them for.


BTW: You omitted the attribution line for the text you quoted, whom do
you blame for that? That said, "Nonsense" is a strong enough word to
start a flamewar... not nice.

;^)

Uli

[Bob Martin]

in 679182 20120821 181439 Dennis Lee Bieber <wlf...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>On Tue, 21 Aug 2012 08:07:33 +0200, Alex Strickland <ss...@mweb.co.za>

>declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:
>

>> On 2012/08/17 12:42 AM, Madison May wrote:
>>
>> > As a lurker, I agree completely with Chris's sentiments.
>>
>> I too, but I'd prefer something top-posted than have to skip through 38
>> pages of quoted e-mail to get to a (generally) 1 liner at the bottom.
>

>Doesn't help me though... Agent shows quoted material as blue, fresh
>text as black.
>
>I tend to not see a one-liner at the top (since it is next to the
>attribution line) and if the rest of the page is all blue text I hit
>page down... and down, down, down... looking for black text... Then end
>up going "Wha', where's the new stuff?" and having to scroll back up to
>find a one-liner cuddling up with the attribution line.

Yep, and the only solution is for everyone to top-post.

[Mark Lawrence]

The only solution is for people to use common sense. At least one snag
is that Voltaire said common sense is not so common.

--
Cheers.

Mark Lawrence.

[Prasad, Ramit]

Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:
> A good tool would reduce the effort and guide users, like e.g. giving
> them a hint if they leave the whole mail they're replying to as copy.
> Several corporate email solutions (like MS Outlook/Exchange) put very
> little emphasis on communication efficiency but only on eye-candy
> features. Their popularity and the resulting influence on people has
> caused decay in average communication culture, and that is what I blame
> them for.

True, but it is by no means impossible or very difficult. It just requires
some effort. I blame the user more and the software less because of quotes
like below.

[ Not Ulrich ]

> GMail uses top-posting by default.

[ Back to Ulrich ]

> BTW: You omitted the attribution line for the text you quoted, whom do
> you blame for that? That said, "Nonsense" is a strong enough word to
> start a flamewar... not nice.

Fair enough. I typically leave off attribution because I would rather
to discuss things with quotes instead of he-said and she-said. The
focus should be on the idea/conversation and less about attributing
"blame" to someone (and it is invariably more often negative attribution
than positive). If attribution is preferred, I suppose I could always
add it back in. Ironically, this is one of the things I wish Outlook
was better about.

Ramit

[Ramchandra Apte]

As BFDL, I hereby command everybody to stop the discussion.
lets put time on useful stuff

i am using google groups (i think it knows what to do)

[Ramchandra Apte]

[Mark Lawrence]

On 24/08/2012 15:23, Ramchandra Apte wrote:
> As BFDL, I hereby command everybody to stop the discussion.
> lets put time on useful stuff

Well I didn't vote for you :)

>
> i am using google groups (i think it knows what to do)
>

--
Cheers.

Mark Lawrence.

[rusi]

Your posts are coming in doubles.
And the quoted lines are coming double-spaced!

Actually the 'new' google groups is considerably more messed up than
the old.
And usually its hard to choose the old.

No offense intended... Just that since I was the one to recommend you
use gg, I feel obliged on conscience to mention this.

[rusi]

On Aug 24, 8:58 pm, rusi <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Aug 24, 7:23 pm, Ramchandra Apte <maniandra...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > As BFDL, I hereby command everybody to stop the discussion.
> > lets put time on useful stuff
>
> > i am using google groups (i think it knows what to do)
>
> Your posts are coming in doubles.
> And the quoted lines are coming double-spaced!

Just saw other double-posts
So checked the mailing list archive which does not seem to have them.

So please ignore my double-post comment (for now).

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 11:53 PM, Prasad, Ramit
<ramit....@jpmorgan.com> wrote:

> Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:
>> BTW: You omitted the attribution line for the text you quoted, whom do
>> you blame for that? That said, "Nonsense" is a strong enough word to
>> start a flamewar... not nice.

> Fair enough. I typically leave off attribution because I would rather
> to discuss things with quotes instead of he-said and she-said. The
> focus should be on the idea/conversation and less about attributing
> "blame" to someone (and it is invariably more often negative attribution
> than positive). If attribution is preferred, I suppose I could always
> add it back in. Ironically, this is one of the things I wish Outlook
> was better about.

PLEASE add attribution back in. It's not about he-said/she-said, it's
about honesty and clarity in reporting. It's far easier to understand
the conversation when we know who said each part, and the normal
opening line that most mail clients put in has a handy condensed set
of headers.

ChrisA

[Ethan Furman]

Chris Angelico wrote:
> PLEASE add attribution back in. It's not about he-said/she-said, it's
> about honesty and clarity in reporting. It's far easier to understand

> the conversation when we know who said each part [. . .]

+1

[Dave Angel]

On 08/24/2012 12:39 PM, rusi wrote:
> On Aug 24, 8:58 pm, rusi <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> <snip>

>> Your posts are coming in doubles.
>> And the quoted lines are coming double-spaced!
> Just saw other double-posts
> So checked the mailing list archive which does not seem to have them.
>
> So please ignore my double-post comment (for now).

I solved nearly all the double-posts here by a simple rule which deletes
any message which is either To or CC: to googlegroups. Each such
message has another which does not.



--

DaveA