Re: Unable to join the Debian User Forum; appears that all IPs are being black-listed.
On 10 January 2015 at 15:40, Wayne Hartell <w.hartell@ozemail.com.au> wrote:
>
> Trying my best with the trimming; I'll keep observing how other people do it
> and try to learn from that.
Hi Wayne,
So ok, it appears you understand the concept of trimming the
conversation, but now it needs to be explained to you that you made a
very serious trimming mistake in the message to which I am replying
(which can be read in full at
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2015/01/msg00319.html)
In that message, you trimmed out the attribution lines that explain
who said what, this is very bad practice! The attribution lines are
the automatic ones that say "on <date>, <person> wrote:". You can see
one of them at the top of this message. These are essential because
each one explains who said what previously according to how many
leading '>' symbols each quoted line is marked with.
Without them, your message is very defective, because the information
about who wrote what is missing.
You should always leave as many attribution lines as the maximum
number of '>' symbols in the lines you quote. For example in this
message I am quoting you only, so there is only *one* level of '>'
symbols, so I have made sure to include the *one* attribution line
that explains that you were the writer of those lines.
You should only trim an attribution line if you also trim everything
it refers to.
The '>' symbol is the most common, but other symbols are sometimes
used too. These symbols and the attribution lines are automatically
added by people's mail software, they are *never* typed manually.
If I wanted to quote earlier writers in this conversation, I would
have kept their attribution lines also. But your having deleted them
means that I can't do that without a lot of unnecessary work, so by
deleting them you break the whole workflow of the conversation for
everyone following you.
I hope this guides you towards a better understanding of
good/essential mailing list workflow and etiquette. You can see that
all the other writers here are following this practice, it's not hard
once you get familiar with it.
For example https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2015/01/msg00303.html
is a randomly seleted example of good attribution and interleaved
quoting. Note how each successive contributor has preserved sufficient
attribution lines at the top to explain each level of '>' symbol that
occurs in the message.
Regards
David
Reply to: