Re: [Python-ideas] Python-ideas Digest, Vol 103, Issue 15
On Jun 1, 2015, at 20:41, u8y7541 The Awesome Person <surya.subbarao1@gmail.com> wrote:
I think you're right. I was also considering ... "editing" my Python distribution. If they didn't implement my suggestion for correcting floats, at least they can fix this, instead of making people hack Python for good results!
If you're going to reply to digests, please learn how to reply inline instead of top-posting (and how to trim out all the irrelevant stuff). It's next to impossible to tell which part of which of the messages you're replying to even in simple cases like this one, with only 4 messages in the digest.
On Tue, Jun 02, 2015 at 03:28:33PM -0700, u8y7541 The Awesome Person <surya.subbarao1@gmail.com> wrote:
What do you mean by replying inine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
I would gladly use forum interface like http://www.discourse.org/ if there was any linked in message footers. Bottom posting is not automated in Gmail and takes a lot of energy and dumb repeated keypresses to complete. On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 1:44 AM, Oleg Broytman <phd@phdru.name> wrote:
-- anatoly t.
On Jun 12, 2015, at 08:02, Ryan Gonzalez <rymg19@gmail.com> wrote:
And if that's too much work, there are Greasemonkey scripts to do it for you. (And, unlike Yahoo, Gmail doesn't seem to go out of their way to break user scripts every two weeks.) But really, in non-trivial cases, you usually want your reply interleaved with parts of the original; just jumping to the very end of the message (past the signature and list footer) and replying to the whole thing in bulk isn't much better than top-posting. And, while some MUAs do have tools to help with that better than Gmail's, there's really no way to automate it; you have to put the effort into selecting the parts you want to keep or the parts you want to remove and putting your cursor after each one. (If you're not willing to do that, and instead assume anyone who needs the context can reassemble it themselves with the help of an MUA with proper threading support--which is pretty much all of them today--then why quote at all?)
Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas writes:
Wrong. :-) *Bottom*-posting is *much* worse. For better or worse, top-posting is here to stay. It doesn't work very well in forums like this one, but it's not too bad if you do it the way Guido does (which of course is one of the reasons we can't get rid of it<wink/>). The basic rules: 1. Don't top-post, and you're done. If you "must" top-post, then continue. 2. Only top-post short comments that make sense with minimal context (typically the subject should be enough context). If it's not going to be short, don't top-post (no exceptions -- if you've got time and the equipment to write a long post, you also are not inconvenienced by using the interlinear style). If it requires specific context presented accurately, don't top-post (no exceptions, as your top post will certainly be misunderstood and generate long threads of explaining what you thought didn't need explanation, wasting copious amounts of everybody's time and attention, and probably burying your contribution in the process). 3. Indicate in your text that you top-posted -- preferably with a sincere apology. If you're so self-centered that sincerity is impossible, an insincere apology is recommended (otherwise you'll probably end up in a few killfiles for being Beavis's friend).
FWIW, from my phone the previous email is completely ineditable and I can't even delete it. Hence my signature, putting the blame firmly where it belongs ;) That said, we basically always use top posting (with highlighting - a perk of formatting in emails) at work so I'm fairly used to it. The way that I read the mailing lists (oldest to newest by thread) also works better with top posting, since I'm permanently trying to catch up rather than carry on a conversation. The problems then are people who don't snip (though people who do snip are also problems... can't win here) and especially those who reply to one part in the middle of an epic and don't sign off, leaving me scrolling right to the end to figure out if they have anything to say.</complaining> Cheers, Steve Top-posted from my Windows Phone ________________________________ From: Stephen J. Turnbull<mailto:stephen@xemacs.org> Sent: 6/12/2015 18:53 To: Andrew Barnert<mailto:abarnert@yahoo.com> Cc: python-ideas<mailto:python-ideas@python.org> Subject: Re: [Python-ideas] Meta: Email netiquette Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas writes:
Wrong. :-) *Bottom*-posting is *much* worse. For better or worse, top-posting is here to stay. It doesn't work very well in forums like this one, but it's not too bad if you do it the way Guido does (which of course is one of the reasons we can't get rid of it<wink/>). The basic rules: 1. Don't top-post, and you're done. If you "must" top-post, then continue. 2. Only top-post short comments that make sense with minimal context (typically the subject should be enough context). If it's not going to be short, don't top-post (no exceptions -- if you've got time and the equipment to write a long post, you also are not inconvenienced by using the interlinear style). If it requires specific context presented accurately, don't top-post (no exceptions, as your top post will certainly be misunderstood and generate long threads of explaining what you thought didn't need explanation, wasting copious amounts of everybody's time and attention, and probably burying your contribution in the process). 3. Indicate in your text that you top-posted -- preferably with a sincere apology. If you're so self-centered that sincerity is impossible, an insincere apology is recommended (otherwise you'll probably end up in a few killfiles for being Beavis's friend). _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
Steve Dower <Steve.Dower@microsoft.com> writes:
This speaks to a deficiency in the tool. Rather than apologising for bad etiquette, surely the better course is not to use a tool that needs such apology? In other words: if your tool can't compose messages properly, don't apologise for it; instead, stop using that tool for composing messages. -- \ “A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of | `\ widths.” —Steven Wright | _o__) | Ben Finney
On 14 Jun 2015 06:06, "Ben Finney" <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
Far easier said than done, especially in an institutional context, as there are currently *zero* readily available email clients out there that adequately cover hybrid operation for folks bridging the gap between the open source community and the world of enterprise collaboration suites. Gmail (and its associated Android app) at least attains "not entirely awful at it" status, but I'd expect Microsoft's clients to still be assuming Outlook/Exchange style models. Cheers, Nick.
On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 10:53:23AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Agreed. The worst case I personally ever saw was somebody replying to a digest on a high-volume mailing list where they added "I agree!" and their signature to the very end. I actually counted how many pages of quoting there were: 29 pages, based on ~60 lines per page. (That's full A4 pages mind, it was about 50 keypresses in mutt to page through it a screen at a time.) Naturally there was no indication of which of the two dozen messages they agreed with.
This is the best description of good top-posting practice I've ever seen, thanks. For what it's worth, I think inline posters also need to follow good practice too: if the reader cannot see new content (i.e. what you wrote) within the first screen full of text, you're probably quoting too much. This rule does not apply to readers trying to read email on a phone that shows only a handful of lines at a time. If you are reading email on a screen the size of a credit card (or smaller), you cannot expect others to accomodate your choice of technology in a discussion group like this. I can't think of *any* good reason to bottom-post without trimming the quoted content. -- Steve
On Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 00:10 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote: On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 10:53:23AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Agreed. The worst case I personally ever saw was somebody replying to a digest on a high-volume mailing list where they added "I agree!" and their signature to the very end. I actually counted how many pages of quoting there were: 29 pages, based on ~60 lines per page. (That's full A4 pages mind, it was about 50 keypresses in mutt to page through it a screen at a time.) Naturally there was no indication of which of the two dozen messages they agreed with. +1 from me as well.
This is the best description of good top-posting practice I've ever seen, thanks. For what it's worth, I think inline posters also need to follow good practice too: if the reader cannot see new content (i.e. what you wrote) within the first screen full of text, you're probably quoting too much. This rule does not apply to readers trying to read email on a phone that shows only a handful of lines at a time. If you are reading email on a screen the size of a credit card (or smaller), you cannot expect others to accomodate your choice of technology in a discussion group like this. Well, we will see how long that lasts. With mobile now the predominant platform for consumption we might be approaching a point where mobiles are actually how most of us follow mailing lists (says the man writing this email from a tablet). And I bet for a lot of people it is becoming more common to follow things like this list in their spare time on their phones when they have a moment here and there. -brett I can't think of *any* good reason to bottom-post without trimming the quoted content. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
: On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 02:10:02PM +1000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
While I agree in principle, others' failure to trim is a handy time-saving measure for me: if there's nothing but quoted text on the first screenful, I take it as a signal that a similar lack of thought went into the original content, and skip to the next message. If there *was* something worth reading after all, there's at least a chance someone who actually knows how to write email replied to it, so I'll see it anyway. -[]z. -- Zero Piraeus: respice finem http://etiol.net/pubkey.asc
On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 8:09 PM, Andrew Barnert <abarnert@yahoo.com> wrote:
And where are those scripts? I find references dated 2008 on some mirror sites, and I doubt that they work. Another problem is that I don't use the same Pip-Boy all the time. The process that need to be automated for Gmail is "Down->Enter->Del->Del->Down->Down" when I enter reply mode. This is the annoying combo that I have to write every time to enter bottom posting insert mode. -- anatoly t.
On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 4:16 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
How is it that Anatoly has such great difficulty editing email to intersperse responses in Gmail, and yet I find the process entirely easy and quick? Oh yeah... I guess I answered my own question by mentioning the name of the complainer. -- Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
May we please continue this discussion elsewhere? I neither feel that this conversation will lead to anything constructive nor see this to be fitting for Python-ideas.
On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 6:36 PM, David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> wrote:
The requirements of the machine <-> human interface are very subjective and depend on the age of a person being introduced to enabling communication technology. I doubt that people younger than 25 are considering email as a communication method at all, and I know that annoying interfaces are the reason why people pretend not to use them. So, it may happen that @python.org discussions are limited to a certain age group because of that. -- anatoly t.
On June 14, 2015 8:57:09 PM CDT, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm under 25! It's not *annoying interfaces*; everything has some annoying interface aspect. That's very subjective. Personally, I prefer email to IM. Remember, you're referring to the nerdy youth, not the normal ones. :) -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
On 15 June 2015 at 12:17, Ryan Gonzalez <rymg19@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm under 25! It's not *annoying interfaces*; everything has some annoying interface aspect. That's very subjective. Personally, I prefer email to IM.
Remember, you're referring to the nerdy youth, not the normal ones. :)
Folks, before we continue further down the rabbit hole, please take into account that Anatoly has already been banned from bugs.python.org and the core-mentorship mailing list for being demonstrably unable to adjust his own behaviour to appropriately account for the needs and interests of other members of the Python community, especially the CPython core development team. (Some additional background on the latter: https://mail.python.org/pipermail//python-committers/2012-December/002289.ht... ) This isn't a case of "poor communication practices from someone that doesn't yet understand our expectations of appropriate behaviour when it comes to considering the needs and perspectives of others", it's "poor communication practices from someone that actively refuses to meet our standards of expected behaviour despite years of collective coaching from a range of core developers". Making a request to the respective list moderators for Anatoly's ban to be extended to also cover python-dev and python-ideas as the main core development lists (as has clearly become necessary) has been approved by the Python Software Foundation Board, but actually putting that request into effect is unfortunately a somewhat complicated distributed task with Mailman 2 so it's still a work in progress at this point in time. (It's my understanding that Mailman 3 improves the tooling made available to list moderators, but the migration of the python.org mailing lists from Mailman 2 to Mailman 3 is going to be a time consuming infrastructure maintenance task in and of itself) Regards, Nick. P.S. Pondering the broader question of managing counterproductive attempts at contributing to a community, my view on the key reason that Anatoly's ongoing attempts to "help" the core development team have proven to be a particularly challenging situation to address relates to the fact that there are two key aspects to effecting change in a community or organisation: * vocally criticising it from the outside (allowing the existing community leaders to decide whether or not they agree with the concerns raised, and subsequently come up with their preferred approach to addressing them) * working to change it from the inside (often by gaining personal credibility through contribution in non-controversial areas before pushing for potentially controversial changes in other areas of interest) Making significant structural changes to a community or organisation usually requires a combination of both activities, as influential insiders echo and amplify the voices of critical outsiders that they have come to agree with, as former insiders leave and adopt the role of critical outsider, and as formerly critical outsiders are brought into the fold as new insiders to help address the problems they noted. Refusing to listen to criticism at all is a recipe for stagnation and decline, so folks are understandably wary of shutting out critical voices in the general case. However, these "critical outsider" and "influential insider" roles in advocating for structural change are also largely mutually exclusive - for an outsider, "how could we make such a change in practice?" isn't their problem, while for insiders, agreeing with a diagnosis of a problem or concern is only the first step, as actually addressing the concern is then a complex exercise in determining where the time and energy to address the issue is going to come from, and how the particular concern stacks up against all the other problems and challenges that need to be addressed. Expanding the available pool of contributor time and energy doesn't necessarily eliminate the latter requirement for collaborative prioritisation, as collective ambition often grows right along with the size of the contributor base. It *is* possible for skilled communicators to pursue both roles at the same time (which can be an amazingly effective approach when handled well), but it's a difficult task that requires context-dependent moderation of their own behaviour, such that when they're using community specific communication channels, they operate primarily in "influential insider" mode, and largely reserve "critical outsider" mode for raising their concerns on their own platforms (e.g. a personal blog). More commonly, folks will choose one approach or the other based on their current level of engagement with the community concerned. By contrast, someone using community specific communication channels while persisting in operating in "critical outsider" mode counts as deliberately disruptive behaviour, as it involves privileging our own personal view of what we think the group's collective priorities *should* be and *forcing* a discussion on those topics, rather than gracefully accepting that there's almost always going to be a gap between our personal priorities and the collective priorities of the communities we choose to participate in, so we need to adjust our expectations accordingly. The combination of "insists on being directly involved in a particular community" and "refuses to address feedback they receive on the inappropriateness of their behaviour in that community" is fortunately rare - most folks will either move on voluntarily once it is made clear that their priorities and the group's priorities aren't aligned, or else they will adjust their behaviour to be in line with community norms whilst participating in that community. For veterans of entirely unmoderated Usenet newsgroups, the historical answer to the problematic "doesn't leave voluntarily when it is made clear that their behaviour is not welcome" pattern has been to adopt personal filters that automatically delete messages from particularly unhelpful group participants. One of the realisations that has come with the growth of online community management as a field of expertise is that this individual filtering based approach is hostile to new participants - newcomers don't know who to avoid yet, so they attempt to engage productively with folks that aren't actually interested in collaborative discussion (whether they know it or not). In the absence of enforced bans, experienced group participants then face a choice between appearing generally hostile (if they warn the newcomers away from the participants known to regularly exhibit toxic behaviour), or generally uncaring (if they leave the newcomers to their own devices). Commercially backed open source communities have actually lead the way in addressing this, as they're generally far more comfortable with asserting their authority to ban folks in the interests of fostering a more effective collaborative environment, and critical voices like Model View Culture [1] have also had a major part to play in pointing out the problems resulting from the historical approach of leaving folks to find their own means of coping with toxic behaviour. Continuing this meta-discussion here would be taking us even further off-topic for python-ideas, though, so if anyone would like to continue, I would suggest the comment thread on http://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2015/01/abuse-is-not-ok.html as a possible venue. [1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/leaving-toxic-open-source-communities -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
On 14 June 2015 at 12:16, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
And you consider that the time it takes you to press six keys is worth more than the time it takes all the people who want to read your message and understand its context, to scroll down, read the message from the bottom up, and then *fix* your unhelpful quoting style if they wish to quote your comment in the context of a reply? Enough said. Paul
On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 11:14 PM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
Small trick: If Gmail has all the quoted text buried behind a "click to expand" button, you don't have to grab the mouse - just press Ctrl-A to select all, and it'll expand the quoted section into actual text. Works in Chrome, not tested recently in Firefox but should work there too. Can't speak for other browsers. ChrisA
On Tue, Jun 02, 2015 at 03:28:33PM -0700, u8y7541 The Awesome Person <surya.subbarao1@gmail.com> wrote:
What do you mean by replying inine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
Oleg. -- Oleg Broytman http://phdru.name/ phd@phdru.name Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.
I would gladly use forum interface like http://www.discourse.org/ if there was any linked in message footers. Bottom posting is not automated in Gmail and takes a lot of energy and dumb repeated keypresses to complete. On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 1:44 AM, Oleg Broytman <phd@phdru.name> wrote:
-- anatoly t.
On Jun 12, 2015, at 08:02, Ryan Gonzalez <rymg19@gmail.com> wrote:
And if that's too much work, there are Greasemonkey scripts to do it for you. (And, unlike Yahoo, Gmail doesn't seem to go out of their way to break user scripts every two weeks.) But really, in non-trivial cases, you usually want your reply interleaved with parts of the original; just jumping to the very end of the message (past the signature and list footer) and replying to the whole thing in bulk isn't much better than top-posting. And, while some MUAs do have tools to help with that better than Gmail's, there's really no way to automate it; you have to put the effort into selecting the parts you want to keep or the parts you want to remove and putting your cursor after each one. (If you're not willing to do that, and instead assume anyone who needs the context can reassemble it themselves with the help of an MUA with proper threading support--which is pretty much all of them today--then why quote at all?)
Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas writes:
Wrong. :-) *Bottom*-posting is *much* worse. For better or worse, top-posting is here to stay. It doesn't work very well in forums like this one, but it's not too bad if you do it the way Guido does (which of course is one of the reasons we can't get rid of it<wink/>). The basic rules: 1. Don't top-post, and you're done. If you "must" top-post, then continue. 2. Only top-post short comments that make sense with minimal context (typically the subject should be enough context). If it's not going to be short, don't top-post (no exceptions -- if you've got time and the equipment to write a long post, you also are not inconvenienced by using the interlinear style). If it requires specific context presented accurately, don't top-post (no exceptions, as your top post will certainly be misunderstood and generate long threads of explaining what you thought didn't need explanation, wasting copious amounts of everybody's time and attention, and probably burying your contribution in the process). 3. Indicate in your text that you top-posted -- preferably with a sincere apology. If you're so self-centered that sincerity is impossible, an insincere apology is recommended (otherwise you'll probably end up in a few killfiles for being Beavis's friend).
FWIW, from my phone the previous email is completely ineditable and I can't even delete it. Hence my signature, putting the blame firmly where it belongs ;) That said, we basically always use top posting (with highlighting - a perk of formatting in emails) at work so I'm fairly used to it. The way that I read the mailing lists (oldest to newest by thread) also works better with top posting, since I'm permanently trying to catch up rather than carry on a conversation. The problems then are people who don't snip (though people who do snip are also problems... can't win here) and especially those who reply to one part in the middle of an epic and don't sign off, leaving me scrolling right to the end to figure out if they have anything to say.</complaining> Cheers, Steve Top-posted from my Windows Phone ________________________________ From: Stephen J. Turnbull<mailto:stephen@xemacs.org> Sent: 6/12/2015 18:53 To: Andrew Barnert<mailto:abarnert@yahoo.com> Cc: python-ideas<mailto:python-ideas@python.org> Subject: Re: [Python-ideas] Meta: Email netiquette Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas writes:
Wrong. :-) *Bottom*-posting is *much* worse. For better or worse, top-posting is here to stay. It doesn't work very well in forums like this one, but it's not too bad if you do it the way Guido does (which of course is one of the reasons we can't get rid of it<wink/>). The basic rules: 1. Don't top-post, and you're done. If you "must" top-post, then continue. 2. Only top-post short comments that make sense with minimal context (typically the subject should be enough context). If it's not going to be short, don't top-post (no exceptions -- if you've got time and the equipment to write a long post, you also are not inconvenienced by using the interlinear style). If it requires specific context presented accurately, don't top-post (no exceptions, as your top post will certainly be misunderstood and generate long threads of explaining what you thought didn't need explanation, wasting copious amounts of everybody's time and attention, and probably burying your contribution in the process). 3. Indicate in your text that you top-posted -- preferably with a sincere apology. If you're so self-centered that sincerity is impossible, an insincere apology is recommended (otherwise you'll probably end up in a few killfiles for being Beavis's friend). _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
Steve Dower <Steve.Dower@microsoft.com> writes:
This speaks to a deficiency in the tool. Rather than apologising for bad etiquette, surely the better course is not to use a tool that needs such apology? In other words: if your tool can't compose messages properly, don't apologise for it; instead, stop using that tool for composing messages. -- \ “A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of | `\ widths.” —Steven Wright | _o__) | Ben Finney
On 14 Jun 2015 06:06, "Ben Finney" <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
Far easier said than done, especially in an institutional context, as there are currently *zero* readily available email clients out there that adequately cover hybrid operation for folks bridging the gap between the open source community and the world of enterprise collaboration suites. Gmail (and its associated Android app) at least attains "not entirely awful at it" status, but I'd expect Microsoft's clients to still be assuming Outlook/Exchange style models. Cheers, Nick.
On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 10:53:23AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Agreed. The worst case I personally ever saw was somebody replying to a digest on a high-volume mailing list where they added "I agree!" and their signature to the very end. I actually counted how many pages of quoting there were: 29 pages, based on ~60 lines per page. (That's full A4 pages mind, it was about 50 keypresses in mutt to page through it a screen at a time.) Naturally there was no indication of which of the two dozen messages they agreed with.
This is the best description of good top-posting practice I've ever seen, thanks. For what it's worth, I think inline posters also need to follow good practice too: if the reader cannot see new content (i.e. what you wrote) within the first screen full of text, you're probably quoting too much. This rule does not apply to readers trying to read email on a phone that shows only a handful of lines at a time. If you are reading email on a screen the size of a credit card (or smaller), you cannot expect others to accomodate your choice of technology in a discussion group like this. I can't think of *any* good reason to bottom-post without trimming the quoted content. -- Steve
On Sun, Jun 14, 2015, 00:10 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote: On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 10:53:23AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Agreed. The worst case I personally ever saw was somebody replying to a digest on a high-volume mailing list where they added "I agree!" and their signature to the very end. I actually counted how many pages of quoting there were: 29 pages, based on ~60 lines per page. (That's full A4 pages mind, it was about 50 keypresses in mutt to page through it a screen at a time.) Naturally there was no indication of which of the two dozen messages they agreed with. +1 from me as well.
This is the best description of good top-posting practice I've ever seen, thanks. For what it's worth, I think inline posters also need to follow good practice too: if the reader cannot see new content (i.e. what you wrote) within the first screen full of text, you're probably quoting too much. This rule does not apply to readers trying to read email on a phone that shows only a handful of lines at a time. If you are reading email on a screen the size of a credit card (or smaller), you cannot expect others to accomodate your choice of technology in a discussion group like this. Well, we will see how long that lasts. With mobile now the predominant platform for consumption we might be approaching a point where mobiles are actually how most of us follow mailing lists (says the man writing this email from a tablet). And I bet for a lot of people it is becoming more common to follow things like this list in their spare time on their phones when they have a moment here and there. -brett I can't think of *any* good reason to bottom-post without trimming the quoted content. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
: On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 02:10:02PM +1000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
While I agree in principle, others' failure to trim is a handy time-saving measure for me: if there's nothing but quoted text on the first screenful, I take it as a signal that a similar lack of thought went into the original content, and skip to the next message. If there *was* something worth reading after all, there's at least a chance someone who actually knows how to write email replied to it, so I'll see it anyway. -[]z. -- Zero Piraeus: respice finem http://etiol.net/pubkey.asc
On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 8:09 PM, Andrew Barnert <abarnert@yahoo.com> wrote:
And where are those scripts? I find references dated 2008 on some mirror sites, and I doubt that they work. Another problem is that I don't use the same Pip-Boy all the time. The process that need to be automated for Gmail is "Down->Enter->Del->Del->Down->Down" when I enter reply mode. This is the annoying combo that I have to write every time to enter bottom posting insert mode. -- anatoly t.
On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 4:16 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
How is it that Anatoly has such great difficulty editing email to intersperse responses in Gmail, and yet I find the process entirely easy and quick? Oh yeah... I guess I answered my own question by mentioning the name of the complainer. -- Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
May we please continue this discussion elsewhere? I neither feel that this conversation will lead to anything constructive nor see this to be fitting for Python-ideas.
On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 6:36 PM, David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> wrote:
The requirements of the machine <-> human interface are very subjective and depend on the age of a person being introduced to enabling communication technology. I doubt that people younger than 25 are considering email as a communication method at all, and I know that annoying interfaces are the reason why people pretend not to use them. So, it may happen that @python.org discussions are limited to a certain age group because of that. -- anatoly t.
On June 14, 2015 8:57:09 PM CDT, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm under 25! It's not *annoying interfaces*; everything has some annoying interface aspect. That's very subjective. Personally, I prefer email to IM. Remember, you're referring to the nerdy youth, not the normal ones. :) -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
On 15 June 2015 at 12:17, Ryan Gonzalez <rymg19@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm under 25! It's not *annoying interfaces*; everything has some annoying interface aspect. That's very subjective. Personally, I prefer email to IM.
Remember, you're referring to the nerdy youth, not the normal ones. :)
Folks, before we continue further down the rabbit hole, please take into account that Anatoly has already been banned from bugs.python.org and the core-mentorship mailing list for being demonstrably unable to adjust his own behaviour to appropriately account for the needs and interests of other members of the Python community, especially the CPython core development team. (Some additional background on the latter: https://mail.python.org/pipermail//python-committers/2012-December/002289.ht... ) This isn't a case of "poor communication practices from someone that doesn't yet understand our expectations of appropriate behaviour when it comes to considering the needs and perspectives of others", it's "poor communication practices from someone that actively refuses to meet our standards of expected behaviour despite years of collective coaching from a range of core developers". Making a request to the respective list moderators for Anatoly's ban to be extended to also cover python-dev and python-ideas as the main core development lists (as has clearly become necessary) has been approved by the Python Software Foundation Board, but actually putting that request into effect is unfortunately a somewhat complicated distributed task with Mailman 2 so it's still a work in progress at this point in time. (It's my understanding that Mailman 3 improves the tooling made available to list moderators, but the migration of the python.org mailing lists from Mailman 2 to Mailman 3 is going to be a time consuming infrastructure maintenance task in and of itself) Regards, Nick. P.S. Pondering the broader question of managing counterproductive attempts at contributing to a community, my view on the key reason that Anatoly's ongoing attempts to "help" the core development team have proven to be a particularly challenging situation to address relates to the fact that there are two key aspects to effecting change in a community or organisation: * vocally criticising it from the outside (allowing the existing community leaders to decide whether or not they agree with the concerns raised, and subsequently come up with their preferred approach to addressing them) * working to change it from the inside (often by gaining personal credibility through contribution in non-controversial areas before pushing for potentially controversial changes in other areas of interest) Making significant structural changes to a community or organisation usually requires a combination of both activities, as influential insiders echo and amplify the voices of critical outsiders that they have come to agree with, as former insiders leave and adopt the role of critical outsider, and as formerly critical outsiders are brought into the fold as new insiders to help address the problems they noted. Refusing to listen to criticism at all is a recipe for stagnation and decline, so folks are understandably wary of shutting out critical voices in the general case. However, these "critical outsider" and "influential insider" roles in advocating for structural change are also largely mutually exclusive - for an outsider, "how could we make such a change in practice?" isn't their problem, while for insiders, agreeing with a diagnosis of a problem or concern is only the first step, as actually addressing the concern is then a complex exercise in determining where the time and energy to address the issue is going to come from, and how the particular concern stacks up against all the other problems and challenges that need to be addressed. Expanding the available pool of contributor time and energy doesn't necessarily eliminate the latter requirement for collaborative prioritisation, as collective ambition often grows right along with the size of the contributor base. It *is* possible for skilled communicators to pursue both roles at the same time (which can be an amazingly effective approach when handled well), but it's a difficult task that requires context-dependent moderation of their own behaviour, such that when they're using community specific communication channels, they operate primarily in "influential insider" mode, and largely reserve "critical outsider" mode for raising their concerns on their own platforms (e.g. a personal blog). More commonly, folks will choose one approach or the other based on their current level of engagement with the community concerned. By contrast, someone using community specific communication channels while persisting in operating in "critical outsider" mode counts as deliberately disruptive behaviour, as it involves privileging our own personal view of what we think the group's collective priorities *should* be and *forcing* a discussion on those topics, rather than gracefully accepting that there's almost always going to be a gap between our personal priorities and the collective priorities of the communities we choose to participate in, so we need to adjust our expectations accordingly. The combination of "insists on being directly involved in a particular community" and "refuses to address feedback they receive on the inappropriateness of their behaviour in that community" is fortunately rare - most folks will either move on voluntarily once it is made clear that their priorities and the group's priorities aren't aligned, or else they will adjust their behaviour to be in line with community norms whilst participating in that community. For veterans of entirely unmoderated Usenet newsgroups, the historical answer to the problematic "doesn't leave voluntarily when it is made clear that their behaviour is not welcome" pattern has been to adopt personal filters that automatically delete messages from particularly unhelpful group participants. One of the realisations that has come with the growth of online community management as a field of expertise is that this individual filtering based approach is hostile to new participants - newcomers don't know who to avoid yet, so they attempt to engage productively with folks that aren't actually interested in collaborative discussion (whether they know it or not). In the absence of enforced bans, experienced group participants then face a choice between appearing generally hostile (if they warn the newcomers away from the participants known to regularly exhibit toxic behaviour), or generally uncaring (if they leave the newcomers to their own devices). Commercially backed open source communities have actually lead the way in addressing this, as they're generally far more comfortable with asserting their authority to ban folks in the interests of fostering a more effective collaborative environment, and critical voices like Model View Culture [1] have also had a major part to play in pointing out the problems resulting from the historical approach of leaving folks to find their own means of coping with toxic behaviour. Continuing this meta-discussion here would be taking us even further off-topic for python-ideas, though, so if anyone would like to continue, I would suggest the comment thread on http://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2015/01/abuse-is-not-ok.html as a possible venue. [1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/leaving-toxic-open-source-communities -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
On 14 June 2015 at 12:16, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
And you consider that the time it takes you to press six keys is worth more than the time it takes all the people who want to read your message and understand its context, to scroll down, read the message from the bottom up, and then *fix* your unhelpful quoting style if they wish to quote your comment in the context of a reply? Enough said. Paul
On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 11:14 PM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
Small trick: If Gmail has all the quoted text buried behind a "click to expand" button, you don't have to grab the mouse - just press Ctrl-A to select all, and it'll expand the quoted section into actual text. Works in Chrome, not tested recently in Firefox but should work there too. Can't speak for other browsers. ChrisA
participants (17)
-
anatoly techtonik -
Andrew Barnert -
Ben Finney -
Brett Cannon -
Chris Angelico -
David Mertz -
Ethan Furman -
Nick Coghlan -
Oleg Broytman -
Paul Moore -
Ryan Gonzalez -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Steve Dower -
Steven D'Aprano -
Tyler Crompton -
u8y7541 The Awesome Person -
Zero Piraeus