[fpc-other] What does Embarcadero spend there time on

[Tomas Hajny]

On Fri, March 8, 2013 17:04, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
>
>> Also, there as no specific person I targeted in
>> fpc-devel. Almost all posts lately contain about 95% quoted text! How
>> does a moderator fail to see this?
>
> I really don't want to prolong this and perhaps upset more people than
> necessary, but has it occurred to you that that's how mailing lists work
> and that possibly your expectations are unreasonable?
 .
 .

Just to add another view (to show that it is not a fight among two clearly
delineated camps):

- I agree to Graeme that many people don't use quoting efficiently -
either always or at least sometimes (e.g. because they forget).

- It is important to stress that "efficient quoting" is subjective and
depends on many factors including used tools, habits and preferences (some
people prefer more context than others), etc.

- Pointing out good practice may be useful and accepted by others even
from just one of the many subscribed people if performed in gentle way
allowing others to improve themselves (without attacking them). One should
probably not expect everybody else to even know what netiquette is these
days (unfortunately :-( ), i.e. providing some specific reference may be
useful and increase efficiency of such a message (text on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_%28technology%29 might suggest some
improvement opportunities for Graeme too ;-) ). Trying to enforce the
expected behaviour (e.g. by pointing it out twice within the same day)
should be certainly left to moderators in my view (and if someone believes
that the moderator does this job insufficiently, it is always possible to
contact him directly to discuss such concerns). I fully agree to Jonas
explaining how other people might feel and why such a response might have
arrived. Jonas simply tried to clarify potential reasons behind a bit curt
reaction from Mark and I don't see anything problematic in that e-mail
from Jonas. (Being a non-native speaker, I just hope that the word "curt"
just looked up in a dictionary matches my intention here - I mean
something worse than "not very nice" but not reaching "inappropriate").

- I believe that the response of Graeme to comment from Jonas was clearly
inappropriate (calling others idiots is always inappropriate in my view
and never leads to any positive outcome) and an obvious reason for the
moderation action (especially if this wasn't for the first time with
Graeme).

- I _personally_ dislike insufficient quoting at least as much as
excessive quoting (and yes, I observe that sometimes in FPC lists too - I
mean messages commenting something without providing any clue what the
statement is about unless looking at the whole thread). Again, different
people, different habits, different preferences.

- I do not share the opinion of Mark that sending URLs should be
considered inappropriate or that senders willing to share some link with
others ought to spend time on creating different (shorter) URLs in cases
like this (and from this point of view I don't see anything wrong on
Graeme's original post). While I do not necessarily always use tools
allowing me to access You Tube on all devices which I use for reading
e-mails, I understand that the choice of devices (with all their
advantages and disadvantages) is fully on my side. My preferred _e-mail_
client has allowed clicking on URLs in plain text e-mails (and launching
these URLs in the WWW browser) since at least 14 years ago, i.e. Mark's
assumption that this has to do with reading e-mails via WWW client is not
necessarily correct. In any case, I believe that a response like: "Sorry,
I cannot access the video when reading e-mails, can you please tell me
what it is about?" might give better results and would not provide
triggers for unnecessary escalation.

BTW, my original reaction when reading Graeme's post was: OK, a link to
some video in fpc-other, I'll see if I have time for watching it later but
I can probably live happily without it too. ;-)

For everybody who read up to this point - yes, I know that I'm a candidate
for being moderated because I tend to express my thoughts in too much
detail leading to very long e-mails (also mentioned as bad habit on the
netiquette link above). If you believe that I'm a bigger idiot than
Graeme, Mark and Jonas together because of this, I'm fine with that. ;-)

Tomas