[FRIAM] Thread/Post hygiene

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Glen's proscriptions are not gratuitous.  He is kindly responding to a specific request for recommendations. 

But I see, alas, that I am a hypocrite.  (Glen has known this for some time, but I have only just discovered it.)  I have no intention of giving up larding.  And I certainly have no intention of giving up hypertext.  And I more often wish a thread hadn't been trimmed than wish it had.  So, I guess what I have to give up on, is the notion that exchanges such as ours, which are full of potentially publishable material, must be recreated in another form, or lost forever to the ages.  This is a bitter pill, for me.  So much of what is written here seems VERY good indeed. 

Oh well. 

Nick  

Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Thursday, June 4, 2020 12:32 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: [FRIAM] Thread/Post hygiene

To All -

Even though I don't follow Glen's 5 commandments religiously (or even well), I appreciate the attempt to normalize the stylization of the conversations here.

I'm facile enough with my own mail-tool and auxiliary tools to
*function* when people get overly idiosyncratic with their mail-client use and formatting. I live with the HTML that sometimes gets embedded by some clients/modes of use.   I *prefer* that people inline images (rather than attach, requiring opening in another tool, etc.) and ???
which I think is usually effected through HTML.  I believed until "just now" that what I see as "blue text with a vertical line on the left" was embedded HTML, i now see it is just the way Thunderbird renders the (now
ancient) Unix Mail formatting of a ">" preceding the line when included (and ">>" etc.)

I prefer *bold* and _underline_ and -italics- markup conventions as well as (HTML again?) fixed/variable width as the only font conventions, though I"m guilty of using the HTML formatting (bullets, indentions etc) and even the Bold/Italics/Underline bits sometimes. 

I'm a larder, but I've tried to cut down on that which also cuts down on the exponential growth of conversations if I don't respond to every point one of you makes with "two thoughts", etc.   I will redouble my efforts to keep the FriAM thread R0 < 1.0.

Everything Glen says about trimming the post to what  you are responding to and sporadically summarizing are things I really appreciate when others do it (well), though sometimes if done poorly it feels like misappropriating a thread.  

We have been so thread-bendy (thread-shreddy) of late that it feels like
*everyone* has given up on this, but I suspect we might be able to rein ourselves in (I caught myself just now almost continuing this under Santa Fe Plaza Riot!

- Steve


On 6/3/20 5:29 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> 0th lesson: Reply, don't Forward.
> 1st lesson: Don't lard, whole thoughts only, top or bottom posted.
> 2nd lesson: Trim the parts of the post you're responding to down to the part you're responding to.
> 3rd lesson: Sporadically summarize the gist of the thread including edited/selected (for and against) [ir]relevant sub-threads.
> 4th lesson: Don't use a web client. Download all of the posts, and download the whole of every post, including the headers.
>
> And, no. *I* will never use HTML compostion unless it's by accident because I'm on a stupid ... I mean "smart" ... device wherein I can't figure out how to make it plain text. What does HTML get you anyway? ... except for extra formatting that takes even more tech to handle well? Now, if you really do NOT want to use email, then don't use email. Move to a different forum technology. There's a-plenty out there.
>
> On 6/3/20 12:21 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>> */[NST===> I hear you callin’ glen, but I genuinely don’t know how to 
>> respond.  If you have ways that we might organize our conversations 
>> so they made more sense, and you are willing to give 
>> expert-to-citizen instructions, I promise to try them.  In the 
>> meantime, you couldn’t, by any chance, speaking of Ludditry, be 
>> seduced into using HTML?<===nst] /*


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