[Klug-general] Was that a flame? Oops!

[Shish]

> Was that a flame? Oops!

I would consider it a flame if it were intentinally offensive; the
intention of what I sent was to educate while remaining relatively
civil.

For an example of actual flamey behaviour, see Julia and Karl
discussing apple products:

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/kent/2007-January/001718.html

Also note that this is the internet, and for a variety of reasons,
people's personalities here are often louder than in person --
comparable perhaps to the effect of drinking a couple of pints of one's
chosen alcoholic beverage.

Once you've been here a while you get used to it, and will find that
people can actually be very loud while remaining approximately civil --
as in the example above, I would think it quite possible that whilst
getting quite heated in that thread, those two could have been utterly
polite when discussing something else in a thread elsewhere.


> I am not sure where I can learn the rules

The most important thing is "Write in a way that is easy to understand".
The "quote, reply, quote, reply" layout makes it very easy to see who
wrote what, what is being replied to, and what the reply is.

For people who have been following the thread all along, the
intendation of the quoted parts makes it easy to skip over bits which
have been previously read, while the brief glimpse triggers their
memory of the previous post so that they can remember the full text;
for people who have just joined the thread, the quote gives enough
context that the reply makes sense.


> incidentally who wrote them? and on whose authority?

They were informally, democratically decided upon based on what makes
life easier for the majority of people. Same as real life etiquette.

Nobody has officially written down the rule "when speaking to someone
face to face, you should speak in a language they understand", and the
queen has not given this statement her official seal of approval -- but
still, it's generally agreed that it's a good idea.


> Some of us have several profiles in our Seamonkey - and I'm one of them. 
> I respond to few, but when I want to respond I must select and copy the 
> text of the incoming memo, switch profile to my personal one, start a 
> NEW (oh horror) email and paste that thread into it.

Does seamonkey not have something like this?

http://shishnet.org/ufufuf/multiple_from.png


> start a NEW (oh horror) email and paste that thread into it. I actually
> thought that might help - apparently not.

Just make it clear what is your own text, and what it is that you're
replying to.


(Sidenote: note how not only have I snipped out the parts of the
message that I'm not replying to, thus saving space, and stopping
people getting confused by overload of irrelevant information; but I've
also duplicated the parts of the message that I'm replying to twice --
thanks to this handy technique, it's possible to read each quote-reply
pair on it's own, and things still make sense)


> Isn't Linux supposed to be sweetness and light to all shades?

You are mistaking user-friendly distros / communities like Ubuntu with
one specific linux user :)

Incidentally, I can't see how my original message could have been
politer and still got the point across as effectively... I suppose I
could have added pleases and thankyous throughout, but IMHO that would
be superfluous, and worse, it could have come across as even more
condascending than normal :P

    -- Shish