[erlang-questions] Announcing Erlang.org Code of Conduct

[Bengt Kleberg]

Greetings,

A top post with all the previous content below can save me time. It acts 
like a cache. I do not have to locate the right email in the archive if 
I want to check something.

It does waste space in aforementioned archive. So perhaps we could 
change the CoC on quoting to be:
Do not quote, to save space in the archive.


Quoting inline has been misused to my detriment. I find that the concept 
brings back unhappy memories and avoid looking at it.


bengt

On 03/18/2015 07:43 PM, Vincent de Phily wrote:
> TL;DR: On a mailing list, if you're not quoting inline, it's better to not
> quote at all. Include only your own text instead of top-posting.
>
>
> On Wednesday 18 March 2015 16:32:52 Joe Armstrong wrote:
>> I like top posts:
>>
>> Why:
>>
>> 1) People have short span of attention - they only read the first few
>> lines, then decide whether they want to read the rest. I know for a fact
>> that people follow links near the top of my blogs and not near the end - the
>> stuffs so boring they don't get to the end.
> [...]
>> 4) The topmost posting is often the most interesting and an indication
>> that a topic is worth of a discussion.
> By that reasoning, nobody is going to read the quote at the bottom, so you
> might as well leave it. This is not a rhetoric suggestion, but real advice.
> Including the whole previous text as a block after your own doesn't provide
> any advantage anyway, that's what archives are here for.
>
> It's actually detrimental, because some people (me included) will waste time
> sifting through the whole blob to see if some of it was used as a quote for
> further discussion as opposed to just copy-pasted whole. Gmail's long-standing
> html quoting bug (the first line of the new text begins with '>') make things
> even more fun.
>
>
>> 2) Interleaving replies with previously posted text often results in a
>> mess where it's impossible to see who said what, especially if their are
>> multiple interleaving. I have recently heard of deliberate manipulation of
>> previously published text, in attempt to manipulate a discussion.
> The whole purpose of "proper quoting" is to make the discussion clearer. If
> you end up writing/quoting a tangled mess you've failed at that task and it
> wasn't proper quoting. Good quoting sometimes require reflowing text inside
> the quotes to make it readable (just as I did here; a good mailer helps).
>
> The alternative you suggest, writing at the top and copy-pasting the whole
> previous thread below, doesn't help readability at all.
>
>
>>   Separately posted articles makes it clear who said what and the
>> postings can be digitally signed
> This is a mailling list with archives, if you want to check who said what,
> check the archives instead of trying to parse the tangled mess of 20 replies
> that included the whole original message at the bottom.
>
>
>