[arch-general] Top Posting Revisited

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

It would appear that on Dec 19, Raghavendra D Prabhu did say:

> In mutt, you cannot limit the quote context I guess and I
> don't want to limit the context by manually deleting the lines

{snip}

> For instance, while replying I make vim place cursor at the bottom
> of quoted reply to ease in replying and also make vim fold replies.

Pardon me Raghavendra, But someone who is comfortable (and competent) enough
with vim to make it automatically place the cursor at the bottom shouldn't
find it hard to use -- VISUAL LINE -- mode to quickly crop out most of the
non-relevant content from a quoted message. So I guess the most relevant
part of your entire post were the words "I don't want to"... <sigh>

Speaking for myself I have to say that while I personally don't give a rat
whether someone does top, bottom, or in-line posting. I do care about "whole
quoting"... Though as long as the new {NON-quoted} text is significantly
longer than the combined total of all the quoted text then I tend to forgive
even that. And I should mention that I'm inclined to think that relevance
matters more than context when trimming. Though admittedly it wouldn't be
right to miss quote to the extent that someone who says they think "all rabid
dogs should be shot on sight",  as only that they think "all dogs" should be...

> To conclude, it is not the theme of discussion with which I have an
> issue but the tone. 

Now here I'm inclined to agree. Even when they are busy picking on someone
for the horrible bandwidth wasting practice of whole quoting  instead of
just the relatively trivial matter of posting on top of a {hopefully} well
trimmed quote, it's much more productive to do so gently. Perhaps to explain
why {in case the alleged offender simply doesn't understand yet} And even to
say 'please'... Whereas to jump in like a swat team on a sniper is only going
to make it more likely that the guy who might have been willing to conform
without agreeing, will instead stubbornly stand with his back against the wall
and fight, like it was as important to never give up as if it was part of the
great Emacs/Vi holy war or something... <grin>

-- 
|   ~^~   ~^~
|   <*>   <*>       Joe (theWordy) Philbrook
|       ^                J(tWdy)P
|     \___/         <<jtwdyp at ttlc.net>>

But if I actually knew everything, then I'd know I was an idiot...