[AC-Admins] Mailing list Administration issues

[Scott Garron]

Inaki Tekalal wrote:
> [... SNIP ...] In fact, its handling top-posting just fine, nicely 
> hiding the quoted text behind a tag that can be loaded only if 
> wanted. This makes the quoted text out of sight, but still lets me 
> pull up the entire original message quickly if needbe, rather than 
> chopped up bits. It doesn't do this for bottom-posted messages.

      AAGGGGGGHHH!  Okay, try this on for size:  IT WOULDN'T HAVE TO HIDE
SHIT IF IT WAS NEEDED IN THE FIRST PLACE.  You're saying that you'd
rather have the extra CPU cycles, programming time, hard drive space,
and bandwidth used in order to handle hiding stuff that shouldn't even
be there to begin with than to just trim it out.  If you need to "pull 
up the entire message quickly if needbe", just pull up the post that it 
is referring to because YOU ALREADY HAVE IT.  If you're the type of 
person who deletes everything after you read it and don't have it, the 
web archive still has it.  All that being said, I'd be willing to bet 
that the number of times that you have to refer to the quoted, original 
message (as well as their signature lines, extra whitespace, and mailing 
list management information) is close to zero.

> I'm curious. How many mail clients default to bottom posting? 
> [...SNIP...] I would be curious to have a list.

      "Bottom posting" implies that you're doing the exact same thing
that you do with top posting except that you put your reply after all of
the quoted text.  That's not the correct way to handle it either.  Hell,
I don't care _as much_ if you top post as long as you only include the
relevant part of the text that you're replying to and/or strip the
signature lines and mailing list management information from the quoted
material.  Having a mess of text, styling, signature lines, and mailing
list management information that WE'VE ALREADY SEEN is pointless, looks
bad, and is a waste.

      To answer your question:  A large number of widely-used e-mail
clients default to top posting.  I think that Thunderbird and Eudora
default to bottom posting.  Pine defaults to top, but it's a quick 
setting to change it.  Regardless of whose client defaults to what, 
straight up bottom posting with no trimming and editing is also equally 
as bad/wrong as, if not worse than, top posting.

--
Scott 'Simba' Garron