On Jun 30, 2014, at 5:11 AM, Nicolas George <[email protected]> wrote:
> In that regard, writing a mail with bad spelling, bad typo or bad overall > presentation is rude, just as speaking to someone while chewing gum is rude. Interesting explanation. When I was getting flamed repeatedly for providing very thorough and detailed explanation of things I was seeing and made the mere suggestion that there might be a problem in Libav, with a complete, runnable app and source code to support it, I was given the explanation that because some of the list members, including some of the devs, didn’t have a mastery of the English language, and therefore didn’t care to read anything longer than a couple of sentences, and thus my posts were annoying. It sounds like definition of what is “rude” is conveniently pliable. So tell me, if a “bad typo or bad overall presentation is rude”, how about harboring an annoyance at someone who actually *does* speak the language of the mailing list, simply because you don’t very well — does that qualify as “rude”? Does giving someone flak for posting more than a few sentences quality as rude? How about a libav dev continuing to call a poster a “troll” because he doesn’t like the behavior a poster claims to be seeing? How far below top-posting does that rank on the “rude” scale? Casting aside the fact that top-posting isn’t necessarily the most readable, standard, or efficient response format, none of this is even the point. There’s no need to hit every new poster who comes to the mailing list with a big “you are rude” label. Do you do that to visitors to your house — invite them in then tell them they are rude for not leaving their shoes on the doorstep, or hanging their coat on exactly the right hook? The point is that hitting every new person who comes along with that is far more rude than whatever idiosyncrasy they stepped on with their inadvertent text formatting. It is a willful choice in how to handle things and converse with people, and it doesn’t really matter what the format — there’s a clear difference between answering someone’s question and appending: “..hey, I know you are new, so welcome to the list, but for future reference, check out the posting guidelines at [link], it will really help readability..” and this: “Don’t top-post, it is rude….and you are doubly rude for not reading the list guidelines.” Everyone knows the difference, and everyone knows the attitude from which each of those derive, and what it communicates to the person on the other end. It is nothing more than a choice about whether to do that or not. And if you don’t want to take the time to type it, there’s this great new thing called cut-and-paste which really speeds the process. Brad
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