2012/9/5 Michael Schnell <[email protected]>: > IMHO just quoting some words where appropriate is the only polite way to > answer to a forum message
Exactly. The main difference between a private email conversation between two people and a thread on a forum or a mailing list is in the 1:1 conversation both parties know the context of their entire discussion already and rarely would need any quotes at all if the sequence of messages is linear and near realtime and also in an 1:1 conversation if both parties don't have a problem with the quoting style or missing politeness or any other eccentricity or even the total absence of any rules there is simply nobody who could be annoyed by it because its only 2 people and if they are both happy with it then its fine. In a forum thread or in a mailing list there is most often a *group* of people involved discussing a topic or its sub-topics in a very non-linear way and even more people will later read *parts* of these *archived* discussions and need to easily reconstruct the (partial) context of a particular posting. Top-posting is totally incompatible with this approach so all have agreed long ago already that top-posting is bad and needs to be avoided in threaded forum discussions.. As soon as the participation in a publicly archived discussion with other people is not only done for temporary selfish reasons (come in, quickly ask for an answer and never come back and not care about others) but instead for joining the *group* of other individuals to have a useful discussion *together* about a topic that does not end up in a total chaos it is *mandatory* to agree at least on some very basic set of protocol rules that have been found to work best in such situations, one of these rules is a reasonable context sensitive quoting style and to not do top-posting because top-posting has been proven to be totally *incompatible* with threaded forum discussions. Its totally incompatible, so anybody who has an interest in the discussion being useful (useful for all participants and not only for himself) will agree to not do it. As simple as that. BTW: The same applies to real-world discussions (more than two people meeting in the physical world to discuss something) there they also usually agree on some minimum standards and protocol rules that have proven to be useful and will try to *avoid incompatible* protocols like for example everybody shouting as loud a he can at the same time while trying to knock down all other participants within a radius of 2m (because this protocol works only in 1:1 discussions where both participants already know beforehand what they are talking about and that they do not need to listen or change their mind) -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
