[volunteergrid2-l] Tahoe-LAFS 1.9.2

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 07:11:19AM -0600, Shawn Willden wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 12:13 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> 
> > People with manners trim and interleave where appropriate,
> > retaining only enough info for context. Threading takes
> > care of all the rest.
> 
> 
> This used to be my position.  Gmail's approach to threading and
> automatically collapsing previous discussion changes that, though.  When
> interleaving isn't necessary, a top-posted thread actually works very well;
> not only is no scrolling required, but a series of new messages show up in
> a very readable manner in the thread display.

The moment a MUA can trim to retain content to only relevant passages
it will also pass the Turing test, and soon after, the era of 
humanity would have ended. So far, I'm not worried. 
 
> As a result, my normal approach is to trim and interleave when I need to
> respond to specific pieces of a comment, or when the person I'm responding
> to has done so.  Otherwise, I top post and rely on MUAs to hide the cruft
> and make the thread readable.  I suppose that's unpleasant for people who
> use a MUA that isn't as good as Gmail.  They should get a better one :-)

It's trivial to hide the entire quoted text, and to post at the top
for any useful MUA.

It's entirely nontrivial to snip irrelevant passages, and to 
add interleaved comments to particular paragraphs. Of course the Net
culture is entirely too far gone so that the people even realize
they're behaving suboptimally. It used to be that you could tell
mouthbreathers from their posting style. No longer. September not 
only never ended, it got worse.
 
> One other bit of e-mail etiquette that has changed over the last few years,
> IMO, is HTML-formatted mail.  At one point there were enough people with

I let HTML-only be automatically rendered to plaintext. Of course
people don't bother with correct quoting either, so it's all for
naught.

> HTML-unaware agents that I thought it impolite to use HTML mail.  Now, I
> think it's fine to send multi-part MIME mail that includes both HTML and
> plain text versions.  Even MUAs that don't support HTML mail now all
> understand multi-part and can display the plain text version.