Let's think about what you're asking for a minute. There are very few on the list who care to spend the energy to participate at all. such lurkers undoubtedly have valuable opinions. But there's some hurdle of effort (or unwillingness) that prevents them from expressing those opinions. Of the people who _do_ participate, very few of them can find the energy to delete all the extra characters, even those added automatically by the mailing list software (at the bottom of each post). I can't even explain how easy it is to delete that before responding. That nobody does it is absolutely flabbergasting, to me. But there it is.
So, when you ask whether it's really that hard, it spawns the questions: Is it really that hard to trim/edit one's replies? ... to use the threading feature of one's email client? ... to ignore threads or particular posters? ... to standardize things across email clients (e.g. the quotation prefix and "quote" line, plain text vs. html, character encodings)? The answers to all these questions is "No" it's not hard at all. These are all problems that have been solved multiple times in other contexts. But it is work (as distinct from play). And work usually requires incentive. What's the incentive? On 10/27/2016 10:29 AM, Nick Thompson wrote: > Is the problem THIS hard? It would seem to me that the first step would be > to simply reorder the email messages eliminating any previous email messages > automatically included in each subsequent message. Once the messages were in > the right order and the inclusions of previous messages were eliminated, I > could write macro’s to get rid of the headers. By inclusions I don’t mean > places where somebody intentionally pulled out a passage from somebody’s > message to comment on. (I believe you call that quotation.) I mean the > routine inclusion of prior messages as a part of the reply process. -- ␦glen? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
