[TxMt] Re: Mailing list reply direction & history standards question.

[Fritz Anderson]

This is way off topic, and an invitation to flame wars. However, I am an idiot...

On Dec 9, 2009, at 11:58 AM, Jack Matier wrote:

> I'm fairly new to mailing lists and was wondering what the standard is for forming replies. I generally try to follow the reply direction that the current thread is following but was wondering if there was a standard.
> 
> Do I form a reply at the bottom or the top?

Putting your reply at the top of quoted text is called "top-posting." People who bother to have an opinion are against top-posting, because it ruins the logical flow of a conversation. Unfortunately, most mail clients encourage it, but how worthwhile could a reply be if its author can't be bothered to move the cursor?

HOWEVER: Sometimes the choice is forced on you. You're replying to someone who has already top-posted. Some purists stubbornly add their replies at the bottom anyway, but I believe this is a mistake: If top-posting is bad because it breaks the flow, then bottom-posting a top-posted reply breaks the flow even worse.

BETTER is what I've done here: If the person you're replying to makes more than one point, put your reply to each point after quoting the original point.

> also.
> 
> Do I include the immediate parent thing I'm replying to or the whole history?

Take the absurd case of people who hit Reply and don't touch the quoted text at all, so the instructions at the bottom on how to unsubscribe are repeated again and again. That's just thoughtless and rude. (People who post replies to digests without correcting the subject line are worse; people who reply to digests by _quoting the whole digest_ are simply to be pitied.)

My practice is to quote only as much of the previous post as is necessary for my reply to make sense (if it does at all). If that means nesting the previous post's previous posts, so be it. Make sure every nested quote includes the attribution line ("On Dec 9, 2009, at 11:58 AM, Jack Matier wrote:"). 

Opinions will differ on how much quoting is necessary to make sense of one's reply. I drop deeper history if I'm not dealing directly with those points. Use your judgment.

I shouldn't have to remind everyone that though I hold them strongly, these are my opinions.

	— F