Am I the only one who objects to HTML-formatted postings on a listserv? I thought there was a rule that postings should be in plain text. Am I mistaken? David Leonard ShaysNet Curmudgeon-at-large
At 14:10 06/06/01, M. David Leonard wrote:
Am I the only one who objects to HTML-formatted postings on a listserv?
No. HTML format postings are just silly. I have a reasonably simple solution, which is to filter them out and not read them. No one who knows me anticipates that I'd actually read an HTML posting, so I am sure that such postings aren't intended for my eyes. :-) Ran
On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, M. David Leonard wrote:
Am I the only one who objects to HTML-formatted postings on a listserv?
David: No. I say we make it a requirement to use a text based mailer (pine?) to participate in this list. What else would a real network operator be using anyway? Chuck
Thus spake Charles Scott (cscott@gaslightmedia.com):
No. I say we make it a requirement to use a text based mailer (pine?) to participate in this list. What else would a real network operator be using anyway?
A Real Network Operator can pick up a phone, vocalise the DTMF tones to dial into a terminal server, and whistle at the remote modem such that it handshakes and connects at a healthy V.90. He then attaches to a console port on his Unix box, does the authentication math in his head in real time, drops to root, and starts listening and sending directly on port 25. He does this all from the comfort and convenience of his padded cell. --John eeeeee-oooooo-ack-er-ack-er-ack..hxhxhxhxhxhxhxhxhxhxbloophxhxpoioioingxhxx
Unnamed Administration sources reported that Charles Scott said:
Am I the only one who objects to HTML-formatted postings on a listserv?
...
No. I say we make it a requirement to use a text based mailer (pine?) to participate in this list. What else would a real network operator be using anyway?
I would welcome a filter/bounce scheme. Next on my "have a little list" is those who top-post. If they can't scroll to the bottom and edit their quotes; I have some special mirror classes to install on them with superglue.... They say the brain adjusts in a few days..... -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433
People who top post actually bother you? Is the other way around for me, and several people I know. I always just figured people who bottom posted were too lazy to go back to the top of the mail. Who'd a thunk? HTML, on the other hand, is just not quite right. Sad thing is, in a support role, you have to try and read it, because a percentage of your users aren't quite clueful enough to turn it off. At a large company that I used to work for(a maker of a very popular email program(begins with E) the sysadmins talked to the dev folks into shipping the internal product with Plain Text set instead of HTML. On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, David Lesher wrote:
Unnamed Administration sources reported that Charles Scott said:
Am I the only one who objects to HTML-formatted postings on a listserv?
...
No. I say we make it a requirement to use a text based mailer (pine?) to participate in this list. What else would a real network operator be using anyway?
I would welcome a filter/bounce scheme.
Next on my "have a little list" is those who top-post. If they can't scroll to the bottom and edit their quotes; I have some special mirror classes to install on them with superglue.... They say the brain adjusts in a few days.....
-- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433
On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Todd Suiter wrote:
People who top post actually bother you? Is the other way around for me, and several people I know. I always just figured people who bottom posted were too lazy to go back to the top of the mail. Who'd a thunk? HTML, on
Being quite a newbie at this (having only done email and Fidonet since 1987 (mostly Fido, email not until 1991)) I'd say that historically top-posting is a MEMO standard thingie, being done mostly by GUI users (ie Microsoft/Mac prone) and email/Fidonet have always been bottom-posters (or rather, actually quoting with > and commenting after each section of text). Top posting and leaving the whole email under what you wrote, I did not see att all basically until Outlook and Eudora (and alike) started showing up as email clients in the wider population. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
Top posting and leaving the whole email under what you wrote, I did not see att all basically until Outlook and Eudora (and alike) started showing up as email clients in the wider population.
Funnily enough, I always blamed pine as the original sinner. In its default configuration it wants you to reply at the top; It even puts your signature above the original message. Pi -- Head Development -- Vuurwerk Internet -- http://www.vuurwerk.nl/ Brainbench MVP Unix Programming, twisted artist and Free Software idiot. Serversitter and Operator for the Efnet and Undernet chat networks. * I need a mental stoma.
I really have to wonder how many of you are/have been postmasters for fortune 500 companies. t On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Pim van Riezen wrote:
On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
Top posting and leaving the whole email under what you wrote, I did not see att all basically until Outlook and Eudora (and alike) started showing up as email clients in the wider population.
Funnily enough, I always blamed pine as the original sinner. In its default configuration it wants you to reply at the top; It even puts your signature above the original message.
I really have to wonder how many of you are/have been postmasters for fortune 500 companies. t ps now everyone is happy, forget i said anything.
On Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 11:03:12PM -0700, Todd Suiter wrote:
I really have to wonder how many of you are/have been postmasters for fortune 500 companies. t
I fail to see the point. -- John Payne http://www.sackheads.org/jpayne/ john@sackheads.org http://www.sackheads.org/uce/ Fax: +44 870 0547954 To send me mail, use the address in the From: header
On Thu, 07 Jun 2001 17:37:25 PDT, John Payne said:
On Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 11:03:12PM -0700, Todd Suiter wrote:
I really have to wonder how many of you are/have been postmasters for fortune 500 companies. t I fail to see the point.
Point? Probably that if you're a postmaster for a large site, you see all SORTS of stupidity that makes the top/bottom quoting seem trivial in comparison. My favorite roadkill on the Infobahn: User complains he can't post to a Listserv, because his postings are rejected as "too long", even though he was only posting short messages. Oddly enough, his mail was about 6,000 lines long - 20 lines of complaint, followed by a signature block that started with 'begin 644 big-n-deep.gif' and ended some 6,000 lines of uuencoded data later with an 'end'. Decorum prevents my saying what the uuencoded data was, but you can guess from the filename. ;) So I drop him a note of the form "It's probably the fact that you have a 6K line .signature".. I get a reply back "I guess this *also* means I should call my ISP and cancel the tech support call about Eudora taking forever to send mail?" Count your blessings, guys and girls.. ;) -- Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech
* Todd Suiter sez: : People who top post actually bother you? Is the other way around for me, and It's not so much the people but the traffic. Top-Posting usually means Fullquote. Almost no top-poste I know bothers to shorten the content below his own $0.01. That said, let's just assume 10 top-posters with reasonably long texts in a row and you've got from 10 to 100 times more traffic than botton-postings. Multiply this by 1000 mailing list subscribers or some 10.000 Newsservers and you add quite some traffic to the 'net. Now let's just think for less than 3 seconds about the guys who make Mailing Lists happen. These guys and gals do it - in most cases - out of enthusiasm, paying bandwidth and server resources so _you_ can read and post. Adding extra traffix to their tab does not strike me as social behavior at all. I always saw Top/Bottom as some kind of age- (netwise) and clue-indicator, the former being a sure sign of less than 3 years of netizenship. That might just be me and should not influence your preferences, tho. Neither should the fact that in most European and American cultures text is read from top to bottom, assuming timelines and question/response pairs associated with the flow of information we receive and process. Unless you're an avvid Jeopardy fan, you might see my point here, I guess. So, that makes three reasons not to Top-Post, one of which I consider important. Just think about it, and then let's see how you like your new life as a bottom-poster.
(last one I swear) IF a thread gets to be that long, it belongs in a newsgroup or forum. And, personally, I don't like editing other folks' stuff, stupid or not, i think of their words as their property... (and I honestly can't figure out why I'm contributing to this thread:)) t On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Jonas Luster wrote:
* Todd Suiter sez:
: People who top post actually bother you? Is the other way around for me, and
It's not so much the people but the traffic. Top-Posting usually means Fullquote. Almost no top-poste I know bothers to shorten the content below his own $0.01. That said, let's just assume 10 top-posters with reasonably long texts in a row and you've got from 10 to 100 times more traffic than botton-postings. Multiply this by 1000 mailing list subscribers or some 10.000 Newsservers and you add quite some traffic to the 'net.
Now let's just think for less than 3 seconds about the guys who make Mailing Lists happen. These guys and gals do it - in most cases - out of enthusiasm, paying bandwidth and server resources so _you_ can read and post. Adding extra traffix to their tab does not strike me as social behavior at all.
I always saw Top/Bottom as some kind of age- (netwise) and clue-indicator, the former being a sure sign of less than 3 years of netizenship. That might just be me and should not influence your preferences, tho. Neither should the fact that in most European and American cultures text is read from top to bottom, assuming timelines and question/response pairs associated with the flow of information we receive and process. Unless you're an avvid Jeopardy fan, you might see my point here, I guess.
So, that makes three reasons not to Top-Post, one of which I consider important. Just think about it, and then let's see how you like your new life as a bottom-poster.
On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Jonas Luster wrote:
* Todd Suiter sez:
It's not so much the people but the traffic. Top-Posting usually means Fullquote. Almost no top-poste I know bothers to shorten the content below his own $0.01. That said, let's just assume 10 top-posters with reasonably long texts in a row and you've got from 10 to 100 times more traffic than botton-postings. Multiply this by 1000 mailing list subscribers or some 10.000 Newsservers and you add quite some traffic to the 'net.
While being guilty of being a top poster many times, I generally do prune the text below. I completely agree with you about people not pruning. I have a customer who for whatever reason can't remember to just send email to noc@ and instead, finds the last email he sent to me and just top-posts to it. I've gotten a few that had messages months old appended to the bottom. <g>
I always saw Top/Bottom as some kind of age- (netwise) and clue-indicator, the former being a sure sign of less than 3 years of netizenship.
I wouldn't consider this an acid test with respect to either. I've been connected since 1985 and still top-post at times.
American cultures text is read from top to bottom, assuming timelines and question/response pairs associated with the flow of information we receive and process. Unless you're an avvid Jeopardy fan, you might see my point here, I guess.
There are times where your reply, although it contributes to the topic at hand, may be much shorter than the message to which you are responding. If you're posting a two sentence response to a 2 page dissertation that someone else posted in a thread, it is much less time consuming for other readers to see your response and signature at the top with the referenced post below. I can't count how many times I've had to scroll down 3 pages to see a response like "I agree. ---sig". I guess this is a good reason to either not top-post or to at least prune the information below your post to those points you're to which you're responding.
So, that makes three reasons not to Top-Post, one of which I consider important. Just think about it, and then let's see how you like your new life as a bottom-poster.
OK. So, the lesson we've learned today is: TOP POSTER = BOTTOM FEEDER? ;-) --- John Fraizer EnterZone, Inc
no, but procmail and sed, html2text, or /dev/null work quite well. no rule or recommendation is going to stop the clue-- from posting html or using MS MUAs (or MTAs). Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 02:10:05PM -0400, M. David Leonard:
Am I the only one who objects to HTML-formatted postings on a listserv? I thought there was a rule that postings should be in plain text. Am I mistaken?
David Leonard ShaysNet Curmudgeon-at-large
On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, john heasley wrote:
no, but procmail and sed, html2text, or /dev/null work quite well. no rule or recommendation is going to stop the clue-- from posting html or using MS MUAs (or MTAs).
Another mailing list server I use for all my lists I admin (uses majordomo) have a filter that simply bounces back all HTML mail to the sender, along with instructions on how to set most MUAs to send text only messages. Works perfectly. Too bad that "out of office replies" doesn't come with a descernable tag one could filter on.... or is there? I actually haven't looked. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
participants (13)
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Charles Scott -
David Lesher -
John Butler -
John Fraizer -
john heasley -
John Payne -
Jonas Luster -
M. David Leonard -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
Pim van Riezen -
RJ Atkinson -
Todd Suiter -
Valdis.Kletnieks＠vt.edu