[Lazarus] lazarus archive

[Bernd]

2012/9/5 Michael Schnell <mschnell at lumino.de>:

> 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)