[PLUG-TALK] alt.religion.email

[Keith Lofstrom]

There is another religious argument about top posting versus bottom
posting.  It is of course going on under the title of:

"Re: [PLUG] Next steps in Bayian SpamAssassin installation"

Please move the top/bottom posting discussion elsewhere, like
plug-talk, or alt.religion.email, AND FIX THE $^%$*& SUBJECT LINE!
If you are going to be sophmoric enough to blather on about RFC1855,
please read the goddam thing, especially the other 98% that talks
about summarizing, quoting appropriately, 72 characters, changing
subject lines to match the content, long binary attachments,
avoiding flamage, etc. 

As in all writing, the golden rule is "consider the needs of your
audience".  Write your diary any way you want, write your code for
functionality and adherence to coding standards, and write for other
people so they can understand what you are writing and quickly 
determine whether they need to read more of it.  "> >> >>> >"
conveys nothing other than laziness, whether it sits above or below
your own deathless prose.  Don't pretend there is some magic algorithm
that will make a huge pile of nested quotes readable; intelligent
communication involves cognition and creativity, not slavish
adherence to favored subsets of rules.

Newbies:  the flamers do have a point,  even if they communicate
it in a petulant and arrogant way.  If you don't make your posting
readable and follow some recognizable pattern you are wasting your
reader's time and you look sloppy.  On the other hand, the usual
>name2 \  >>name1 \  >>content1 \  >content2  format that results
from lazy use of the "r" key, which some glorify with the name of
"bottom posting", is no less sloppy.  The point is to massage the
old text to make it readable in a new context and follow a time
sequence, while preserving attribution and avoiding misquoting. 
Archived mailing lists that get digested face additional constraints; 
html,  PGP keys, and binary attachments are so much space-filling
trash, for example, and don't belong on ASCII mailing lists.  But
if you think the majority of your readers would prefer deviations
from some rigid standard in a particular instance, go ahead and
deviate from the norm.  This is about readability, not rules.

Keep in mind that this mailing list is archived, so sophmoric flamage
will follow you for the rest of your life.  Imagine that job interview
30 years from now, where your interviewer has run a quick net check
on you.  She may be disturbed that you were so idiotic as to flame
then-young and now-famous John Q. Noobe on some tiny bit of pedantic
trivia.  Your future will depend somewhat on the prudence and sympathy
you show in your writing today.

And if your own future doesn't interest you, at least consider the
future of Linux.  Our best selling point is the support we offer
newbies.  Our worst selling point is our bombastic flamage of people
that do not adhere to our own rigid, neurotic, and arbitrary standards.  
To the extent that we indulge in the latter unfriendly behavior, we
limit the spread of free software.  No healthy person wants to
emulate assholes.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom           keithl at ieee.org         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs