Re: [Evolution] A Digression on Digests

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Sat, 2011-04-02 at 16:28 +0100, Pete Biggs wrote:
> > Nothing to do w/ corporate email or BB's.  It's much easier to reply &
> > it's much easier to read a sequence of emails that are top posted.

Bull $#^*&@^#,  top-post messages are harder to read.  One has to
remember that message are not always [even typically] read
in-thread-order (thus no mental-state-tracking is in play).  Mail list
messages are often read months, or even years, later; either in list
archives or via any variety of search mechanisms.  A well-formed
inline-quoted messages is 10,000,000,000,000 times easier to
understand/follow and place in context.

One purpose of a forum is to facilitate discussion, a second and equally
important function is to serve as a knowledge-base.

> Like hell it is - it is just overly confsing - how many times have you
> seen a message that is, in its entirety, something like "yes, I think
> that is correct" followed by a few thousand lines of included email
> conversation without any indiction of what they are actually agreeing
> with.  It's lazy and just transfers work to other people making them
> continually move up and down through an email to try and work out what
> you are talking about.

+1 lazy
+1 transfer-of-effor

> e.g. if I just say to the next bit of your email