>>I *would* say that it's in the posters' own best interests to "do as >>the Romans do", but if they refuse that little bit of courtesy to the >>rest of the group just to *insist* on doing what they want to keep >>doing, then hey, their emails don't even get looked at, let alone >>replied to.
>Exactly! Gene, you hit the nail directly in the head: if people insist >on being rude and ignore list *guidelines* (not rules, guidelines, it's >a matter of courtesy, not law) and consider their time more valuable >than mine, I won't spend even a femtosecond reading their messages. >Fortunately, this can be fully automated. I'll just generally look at the first video-page. Anything of interest (ie, new text, readable style) and I'll keep reading. Nothing of interest and/or offensive format, I'll skip it unread. >And BTW, when a top-poster has not been warned I allow a bit of >tolerance margin just in case he was not aware of the guidelines or >whatever (hey, everyone can have a bad day, me first). After he has been >warned, my tolerance level is zero because he cannot plead ignorance. Someone coming from a business environment, where all those morons insist on top-posting as their /de facto/ standard (thanks, M$, you sonsabitches) it may be simply forgetting to "switch modes". Me, I'm stuck with OutHouse for now, so I have to ^A the entire text, clipboard it, toss it into 'vim' to reformat it, then clipboard it back again, so it's a rather tedious but not odious process. Doing so manually, forget it, I'd prune down to nothing but a [summary] line vs '>'ing quoted text line by line. Point being, I'll allow *some* latitude, but do *not* accept "It's the only mailer I have access to" as an excuse to keep top-posting, because if *I* can go through that trouble (as I did for this and prior messages today), then so can someone else. Someone once mentioned an uneditable "feature" on blackberries (umm, african-american-berries now, I guess) where it top-posts and doesn't even allow you to edit/see the original text, and if so, I'd do whatever I could to *NOT* reply/post from one. Still, top-post at your own peril, at least if you actually want anyone to see your posts. What galls me, though, is that "cutesy" email, almost always html, with garish colorschemes, weird-ass indentation, blinding-white backgrounds, etc., the poster had to actually go out of his way to select. And *THAT* I find utterly unforgiveable. I had one client who did exactly that and even had a background image of a spiral-bound notebook left-border, as if that were supposed to be "cute". I was forced to actually read his emails (once, only, as I generally refused to reread any from him), but Hell if I didn't *immediately* strip all the crappy html out of it before replying, even if he decided to use colors, emphasis, etc., peppered throughout his text. (<alt><o><t><y></alt> in OutHouse, in case anyone's interested.) And no amount of cutesy html can hide atrocious grammar/spelling, if you know what I mean. <snicker> Anyway, I vented enough for now... --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
