[pmwiki-users] please don't use formatted email

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sat, Apr 15, 2006 at 03:44:50PM +0100, Richard Brown wrote:
> On 14 Apr 2006, at 16:06, Chris Cox wrote:
> > Didn't mean to fuel a fire... it's just that a complaint
> > was registered about posting style and the post was
> > a "top post"... I found that to be funny.
> >
> > I'm human.  I can easily deal with a plethora of
> > posting styles.  My guess is that other people
> > can deal with it as well.
> >
> I have to admit that I don't like top-replies and I don't like html. So 
> I just delete away.
> [...]
> Over to you Patrick on policy or any other list statement. If Patrick 
> doesn't want to put a statement in it's because he is happy with the 
> way the list is run!

I'm amazed how long this thread has wrong.  It appears some sort
of statement from me is indeed needed.

Like PmWiki, HTML, and all sorts of other protocols, I tend to follow
the "be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you produce"
guideline.  I think the mailing list should do the same.  I definitely 
don't want to make people feel unwelcome simply because they aren't 
aware of various forms of email etiquette.

In general I prefer plain text emails, and inline responses
(with liberal deletion of quoted text).  But these aren't hard-and-fast
rules -- there are times when top-posting can be acceptable, e.g., 
when making a relatively short response to an entire message as 
opposed to the individual points within the message.  For example,

    I think everything said in this thread is wrong.

    On December 25, 2005 Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
    > ....

is probably better than having to get to the bottom of

    On December 25, 2005 Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
    > ......
    > [300 lines of quoted text, none of it cut]
    > ......

    I think everything said above is wrong.

When responding to a message, I also tend to respond in the same
form as the original, so that if someone top-posts in a message
to me, then I top-post back (unless I'm replying to individual
points of the message, in which case I'll use inlined responses).

As far as HTML vs plain text is concerned, I think it's useful
to advise people that plain text is preferred, but we don't
have to be strict about it.  If it's inconvenient for someone
to post in plain text (and there are times where this is the 
case) I'd still prefer to see their post in HTML as opposed to
not-at-all.

I like for PmWiki to be as forgiving and accepting an environment
as it can be, and this extends to the mailing list.  We can advise
people of better ways to do things, but failing to do so shouldn't
be cause for exclusion.  

Individuals are of course free to do what they want -- if 
someone wants to ignore all HTML or top-posted emails, that's 
perfectly okay.  Ultimately we can rely on community standards
to take effect -- over time, people who fail to follow the standards
tend to get ignored.  

(Side story: On some other lists I subscribe to, I
automatically delete or ignore posts from some authors simply 
because I know from past history that over half of their posts
will quote a long sequence of messages, and then have a short
one paragraph (and unhelpful) response at the bottom.  If they
at least put their stuff at the top I'd at least scan it,
but as it is now I figure if it's not worth their time to make
it easy for me to read, it's not worth my time to read it.)

Pm