Please trim replies WAS Dual Licensing Woes

[Joseph Sinclair]

Joshua Zeidner wrote:
> On 1/23/07, Mike Schwartz <mike.l.schwartz at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 1/22/07, Dennis Kibbe <dennisk at linuxquestions.net> wrote:
>>> On Sun, 2007-01-21 at 20:35 -0800, John W wrote:
>>>> Sorry but if it makes sense do it....
>>>>
>>> Not only does it make sense but its been the right thing to do and
>>> written into the FAQs since newsgroups/mail lists began.
>>>
>>> Trimming, bottom posting (as apposed to top posting), avoiding "me too!"
>>> replies, useful & searchable titles (hear that digest readers?) and
>>> proofreading replies all help to improve quality and usefulness of a
>>> list.
>>>
> 
>    Aren't these the kind of problems that computers are supposed to solve?
> 
>    ARE WE NOT PROGRAMMERS?????
> 
>    I hope the Drupal guys design something to stop these highly
> redundant discussions.
> 
>   -jmz
---
Not everyone on the list is a programmer, or even technically inclined.

That said there are plenty of tools to handle automatically hiding old replies, managing threads, etc...
Most of them, however, enforce a top-posting paradigm.  That's just what the majority of the public expects (thanks to software like Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Mozilla, and even new things like GMail).

If you want to forcibly reformat everything to bottom post for your own comfort, feel free to write it, I suspect there is some useful example code in Thunderbird for detection, and a bit of Python or Perl from there wouldn't be too hard...

Personally I don't worry too much about it, I prefer top-posting, but I'll switch up from time to time when I think it helps produce a clearer message.

I will say that doing anything like that on a server is just plain BAD.  Servers should pass messages as cleanly as possible.  Let clients play with formatting, that's what clients are for, keep the server neutral or you end up causing harm for no reason.

==Joseph++