A Riddle

[em1897 at aol.com]

WRONG on all counts!

Firstly, anyone who uses their own server for lists is
a complete idiot. Are you trying to insult everyone
who has found AOL or Yahoo or Gmail to be more
convenient for not clogging their server with lists
traffic? Or do you just feel important because you
laid out the $20 for your own domain?

And YES, they do default to top posting. You hit
reply, and you get this (see below). Its not really
conducive to bottom posting, and when you do
a google search and hit a long thread you read the
answer you want first, rather than having to page
down 200 times.  If you're over 50 and once
used a pdp11 then you may argue the opposite,
but times are a-changing, so get with it.


-----Original Message-----
From: Fabian Keil <freebsd-listen at fabiankeil.de>
To: em1897 at aol.com
Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Sent: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 21:59:59 +0100
Subject: Re: A Riddle

em1897 at aol.com wrote:

> --- Chris <racerx at makeworld.com> wrote:
> > em1897 at aol.com wrote:
> > > Hmm, I wonder if the lack of performance, or the
> > unwanted
> > > emails were more heavily weighted in the
> > decision?
> > >
> > > If there was any intelligent life on the list you
> > could
> > > counter what you call "Trolls" with solid technical
> > > arguments. This reminds me of the old bsdi
> > > list. A bunch of half-wits who are just happy
> > > to belong to something and have other half-wits
> > > to correspond with.
> > >
> > > FreeBSD used to have open discussions between
> > > users and developers and it used to be real
> > > good. Now it sucks and the developers are
> > > detached, off in their own little world. See
> > > a pattern?
> > >
> > > But with a user base from places like gnu-rox.org
> > > and makeworld.com, what do you expect I
> > > guess?

Please have a look at your own email address.

> As an aside, all of the major web mail providers
> default to "top posting". Google (ever hear
> of them?) only shows the top N lines of a post.
> So if you bottom post, you don't see the message
> you want to see
> without having to make an effort. So when are
> you troglodytes going to climb out of your
> 1994 hibernations and get with the times?

They don't default to top posting, they put
the cursor on top, so you can read the whole
message and cut irrelevant parts before replying.

If Google doesn't display the whole message,
the interface is crap. That's not the fault of
anybody on this list.

> You may prefer one over the other, but its
> hardly a capital offense to do otherwise. Most
> of us have evolved out of our unix newsreaders.

If you want to be read by as many people
as possible on this list, the easiest way is
to write well formed mails.

Unfortunately, you are not only top posting,
your mailing software also inserts line breaks
where there shouldn't be any and makes it
hard to see who wrote what.

Have a look at the beginning of this mail.
Your quotation is a mess.

> Anyone with a brain is using web mail for
> mailing lists these days: no more whining
> about spam or "wasted bandwidth".

Having a brain is good, but  using it is even better.
If the web interface produces garbage, changing
the interface could be a smart move.

Just my two brainless cents.

Fabian
--
http://www.fabiankeil.de