[kwlug-disc] trimming posts

[Ralph Janke]

I am still using mutt since still no graphical client will work for my
volume of e-mails. 

Otherwise... TL;DR so I just guess what this is about... It is indeed
impractical to somehow manually trimming posts...

My 2 Canadian cents....

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 08:55:13AM -0400, Darcy Casselman wrote:
> I'm writing this on a 4x8 slab of plastic and glad with my finger tip. What
> you're proposing is ridiculously impractical.
> 
> You can't assume that everyone is still using pine or mutt. Threads are
> nicely laid out and comment blocks are conveniently hidden. I don't use vi
> to edit email anymore; I just wrote a couple sentences in the box on top
> and hit send.
> 
> Darcy.
> PS: http://five.sentenc.es
> Allow me to re-arrange this conversation so that (chronologically
> speaking, at least) it is a little more coherent:
> 
> On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 12:42:17PM -0400, unsolicited wrote:
> > Subject: Re: [kwlug-disc] trimming posts
> 
> >> On 14-04-20 12:27 PM, Adam Glauser wrote:
> >> In case people skipped over this bit in Steve's signature, I
> >> thought I'd highlight it.
> >> ... [see signature line below]
> 
> > On 14-04-20 12:35 PM, rbclemen at gmail.com wrote:
> >> Top posting makes the perfectly reasonable assumption that
> >> most people in the discussion aren't new to it, and don't need
> >> to scroll through a dozen pages of now poorly formatted text
> >> they have already read to find the start of the purpose of the
> >> email.
> >
> > Agreed. The quoted text is from a time long since passed, and
> > the world of e-mail lists instead of newsgroups has moved on.
> > Especially in a small local geographic list such as this is.
> 
> That assumption is not reasonable. How can you argue that everyone
> has kept in mind the same details of the discussion that you
> have? At the very least, it's a courtesy to those with whom
> you're corresponding to show a continuity in the discussion
> points. It's also not a good idea to assume that people aren't
> busy doing other things between posts.
> 
> As for "a dozen pages of now poorly formatted text", why do you
> recycle it with each message? Why not just delete it if you don't
> expect people to go through it?
> 
> In regards to "moving on", since when has progress in time
> inherently resulted in improvements? I'll quote Arthur Dent:
> "I've gone off the idea of progess. It's overrated." The point of
> this discussion (and the "quoted text", i.e., the wikipedia
> article) is to argue that the "moving on" has been in the
> direction of decreased coherency, sort of like "moving on" in the
> fast food industry over the past few decades has resulted in a
> massive increase in garbage.
> 
> > Granted, digesting makes the problem worse, which is why I have
> > long since abandoned it on most any list I participate in.
> 
> The digest format magnifies the problem, especially when people
> include all of the digest in their replies. That's sheer
> laziness. But it's also laziness to include parts of the message
> you have no intention of referring to.
> 
> > Paul's 40k limit for the purposes of keeping posts small is specious
> > - I can't recall the last time I saw a post get anywhere near it. It
> > does, however, keep most attachments away, for which I am very
> > grateful.
> 
> The point of his post was not the 40k but the criticism that
> people are not trimming their posts.
> 
> One of the first Unix principles I was taught: Silence is golden.
> A program should not return messages (to stderr, i.e., the
> console) if it has accomplished what you expected. Command syntax
> is terse, as is typical Unix markup. There were physical reasons
> for this, of course, which no longer hold. But the elegance of it
> is the reduction of noise on the system, fewer bytes to store and
> clean up, concise input (despite the fact that the programmers
> I knew were exceptionnally good typists). Large, cheap storage
> systems and extremely fast CPUs don't change the signal to noise
> ratio.
> 
>         -- Steve
> 
> --
> Steve Izma
> -
> Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener N2H 1W6    p:519-745-1313
> Work: Wilfrid Laurier University Press    p:519-884-0710 ext. 6125
> E-mail: sizma at golden.net or steve at press.wlu.ca
> 
> A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> A: Top-posting.
> Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style>
> 
> 
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