Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
[Patrick Shanahan wrote:]
http://www.reedmedia.net/misc/mail/using-mailing-list.html#quoting
doesn't currently load the page
Works for me.
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote1.html#ss1.1
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/mailing-list-faq/etiquet
te.html
Thanks for proving my point. Both explain how to attribute,
but not why. The latter makes the point to not attribute to
the wrong person - which I never do ;)
And that's about as much time as I'm prepared to give this
topic, sorry.
Volker, while I won't let this one issue get in the way of
my general feelings of affinity for you, I think you're
being extremely short-sighted here. I do find it highly
annoying, or I wouldn't have said anything. This isn't all
just about you, though; you see, now I'm quoting you quoting
Patrick, and I don't want to lose the attributional flow, so
now I have to go back to *his* message and copy his name
to my Clipboard buffer (don't want to misspell it) and paste
it in to *your* message. You're making extra work for those
following up to you. Or if they don't bother, then they are
being coerced into following your lazy practice.
In an earlier follow-up to me, you replied:
I beg to differ. You're the only one who ever complained, and
I post a lot in public. If anyone really cares about who wrote
what, the fine archive will have the answer. For practical
purposes nobody cares what I said, only whether it solves the
problem. And anything I post has my name above and below it
anyway, so I don't see the point. If it's quoted it's obviously
from someone else, so it's not that the current poster is
putting a claim to it.
That's all just silly. If I'm the only one who ever complained,
then it's only because of what my cousin once told me about me,
namely that I say things out loud sometimes that others think
to themselves but do not say. (For every complaint, there are
1000 silent critics, I've also heard.)
As I said earlier, this isn't about my wish to claim copyright
on my words, or to extol their wonderfulness. I say plenty
of crap, and sometimes I just wish I could efface them. :-)
However, why have attributions at all, ever? Why not just go
to the archive and have a bunch of text that was said? Who
cares if Volker said it, or Dallman, or some other idiot?
The point is, people establish a personality in a group, and
others learn to grant more or less credence to their input
depending on their historical performance. If someone none
of us knows comes into this group and says, "Hey, here's how
to eliminate all spam!!!!!
:0
| rm -rf *.*
[DON'T DO IT!]
you probably want to realize that you don't know that dork
from Adam and you will want to apply what he says with a bit
of caution.
Less extremely, we need to know when we err so we can
correct ourselves. Others need to know when I goof, and I
need to know when they do, so we can refine our collective
knowledge.
Finally, and I posted about this last fall, ultimately someone
will come along here and say, "Hey, I read on the Internet
to do this . . ." and then post some broken syntax that is
a bad pastiche of something discussed here and fixed weeks
and months earlier. Then, and this has happened to me several
times, I have had to take that on and post how that was a
corrupt version of something I wrote, or Bart wrote, or
Ruud wrote, or . . . , and the poster should go to the
archives and find the good original.
Dallman
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