On May 24, 2015 11:04 AM, <josef.pktd@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 1:49 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>> On May 24, 2015 8:43 AM, <josef.pktd@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > Reminder: we are bottom or inline posting
>>
>> Can we stop hassling people about this? Inline replies are a great tool to have in your toolkit for complicated technical discussions, but I feel like our weird insistence on them has turned into a pointless and exclusionary thing. It's not like bottom replying is even any better -- the traditional mailing list rule is you trim quotes to just the part you're replying to (like this message); quoting the whole thing and replying underneath just to give people a bit of exercise for their scrolling finger would totally have gotten you flamed too.
>>
>> But email etiquette has moved on since the 90s, even regular posters to this list violate this "rule" all the time, it's time to let it go.
>
>
> It's not a 90's thing and I learned about it around 2009 when I started in here.
> I find it very annoying trying to catch up with a longer thread and the replies are all over the place.
>
>
> Anne is a few years older than I in terms of numpy and scipy participation and this was just intended to be a friendly reminder.

And while I know you didn't mean it this way, I'm guessing that being immediately greeted by criticism for failing to follow some arbitrary and inconsistently-applied rule was indeed a strong reminder of what a unpleasant place FOSS mailing lists can sometimes be, and why someone might disappear from them for a few years. I think we can do better.

This is pretty off-topic for this thread, though, see so let's let it lie here. If anyone desperately needs to comment further please email me off-list.

-n