Forums vs Mailing Lists

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 09:33 -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
> I can see how Forum users could feel that way.  Personally, I killfile the
> lot of them - it's not that I believe they have less to contribute, I just
> can't follow their conversations when they all have the same name and don't
> quote.  If the Forums would at least allow people to create an account (I
> expect they do) and use that account information to create the From header
> on the mailing list, I'd stop ignoring them.
> -- 
> derek


100% agree... I hate anonymous "from" e-mails headers, I like to have a
full name, helps me picture a real human being at the other end, then
often, to top it all, the author doesn't even sign his mail at the
bottom, doesn't edit the message he is replying to properly, going as
far as adding "me too" after quoting 2 miles of text, with a tiny font
in HTML format instead of "mono" plain text.
A properly identified and formatted and edited message is so pleasing to
read, it motivates one to read it and reply to it.
One problem I notice with e-mails coming from the forum, although I
doubt it is intentional from the posters, is that every "line feed"
character is doubled, which wastes lots of space and keeps even short
messages from fitting on screen...
Someone already mentioned this IIRC (Senectus ?).
I did watch for it at some point, and noticed that NOT all e-mails from
the forums do this. Me thinks it could be due to people writing from
Windows instead of Linux. I think I had some trouble like this elsewhere
(when the text of an add when selling something on eBay IIRC), and found
out the "return" characters were not the same in Linux and Windows. A
return character in Windows would show up as two line feeds in Linux, or
vice versa... something like that ;-)



--
Vince