** Sometime around 21:37 -0400 08/23/02, murr rhame sent everyone:
>
>I find top-quoting extremely annoying on most mailing lists.
Based on your message, I believe you actually mean "top-posting," not
"top-quoting" -- in which case, I agree with you completely.
>A
>$ub$criber typically quotes back an entire article, adds a few
>lines of their own to the top, and sends the whole thing back to
>the list. This makes threads difficult to follow when $ub$cribed
>in individual post mode. The dige$ts can become nearly
>indecipherable.
Agreed on all points. It is for these reasons, plus the fact that
having *some* subscribers top-post and other subscribers bottom-post
(or what I refer to as "threaded posting") quickly renders the thread
completely indecipherable, even in MAIL mode, that we have recently
commenced a Jihad To Enforce Threaded Posting(tm) on all of our
mailing lists. We've currently rolled it out on a trial basis to only
a couple of lists, but so far the response seems to be better than
expected. (Note that I expected roughly *zero* change in subscribers'
posting habits, so any positive change is "better than expected.")
FWIW, I blame the Bane Of Top-Posting on Microsoft and Outlook [Express]. :-)
>Fortunately, my lists all use a footers that
>include instructions for un$ub$cribing, the user's $ub$cribed
>email address and other info. I've set up a filter that looks
>for some of the strings in the footers which are very unlikely to
>be mentioned in the body of a reply. If a $ub$criber blindly
>quotes back the whole article, including the footers, their post
>is rejected and they receive a polite email notifying them of the
>rejection and describing how one should use quotes on a mailing
>list. Wish I had thought of this years ago.
A good idea, if one uses footers. We use RFC2369-style List-X headers
instead. We could use footers in addition to List-X headers, but
footers have proven to be annoying to the majority of subscribers,
and effective primarily in cases where the subscriber is sufficiently
heads-up to not need them, anyway.
Speaking of RFC 2369 ... does anyone know of any mail clients that
actually use the List-X headers to provide, for example, an
"Unsubscribe From Mailing List" button on the client's UI? I (as
many) was hoping to see at least _some_ adoption of the standard, but
I'm not aware of any mail clients that have implemented it. REQUEST:
If it has been implemented in Outlook/OE, please don't tell me; I
have a long-standing dislike of that particular mail client(s), and I
certainly don't want something as lame as reason to come between me
and my personal pet peeves. Mucho mahalo.
- Vince
P.S. -- The observant reader will note that this message posted to
the list just fine, and was quite easily read, without resorting to
the annoying and unnecessary substitution of dollar signs ($) for the
letter "s" in words like "subscriber," "digest," etc. Nor is the
substitution of the letter "z" any better. </editorial_comment>
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