Re: Re: [Alpine-info] Reply Top Posting

On Wed, 26 Nov 2008, Rick Lewis wrote:
> Pine and alpine are fine the way they are.
> Too many people unnecessarily include the entire text of prior
> messages instead of just quoting the relevant passages they're
> replying to or writing a one- or two-line summary of prior
> comments.

Most tech support People retain entire text as policy I notice. I
understand many are instructed to not delete any part of the old or
previous message. For followup & review.

Otherwise, carrying to much of old quotes is a problem for all of
us. How much to keep sometimes is decided too quickly when replying
& maybe we leave too much or cut too much. Part of life.

> Also as a blind person using speech software, when quotes are at
> the top, I must wade through what I've already read and understood
> in order to get to the meat of the new message.

A special problem! If the amount of quoted material was solved,
would the bottom-quoting really hurt you?  As a user edits out extra
text & quotes below, would that not help the blind even more?

It seems the editing out of old unnecessary text is the problem to
solve for all of us. And many People are bottom-posting now anyway.

Am I causing you a problem in this reply? I am curious!

If People are provided with the cursor just above the signature,
below the quoted message, at least top-posting is ended for the rest
of us. Now how could that be used to alert users to clear out old
text?  Alert the user by number of quoted lines?  Maybe a line count
display or highlighted somehow. Maybe this is getting too complex!

> The real problem is laziness on the part of email writer, not pine
> or alpine, which do exactly what they should.

Lazy People we are stuck with. I am guilty often. Worse, we may be
under a time limit & must decide & act quickly.

It sounds like the blind suffer mostly from a problem due to large
quoted replies. When writers bottom-post now, manually moving the
cursor down, your comment about Pine & Alpine doing "what they
should" do become irrelevant it seems. I think the blind suffer
either way. No quick solution.

The bottom-post feature I suggest would best be a Setup-Config
option, on or off, like the bottom-signature option. Don't link them
automatically. Let the user decide. A role could be used to reply to
certain People with or without bottom-posting!

For you Rick, I would make a note for the future, now knowing you
are blind, to try & reply in a way to not hurt you. Even top-post if
requested. On a forum like this though, many users are affected. Do
I reply for you, or for everybody?

--
The Best to You & Yours,
M. Ross All Rights Reserved
[email protected]
subj-code: alpinelist
mrossarr.nixsyspaus.org/

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