Re: [gentoo-nfp] Re: Daniel Robbins Controversy Unfairly Reported in GMN

[Douglas James Dunn]

On Monday 21 January 2008 11:46:06 am John Alberts wrote:
> Square Bottle wrote:
> > [Responding to two different people in one posting to keep the number
> > of emails down.]
> >
> > On Jan 20, 2008 8:56 PM, Mike Frysinger <vapier@g.o> wrote:
> >> a few things:
> >>  - fix your top posting (in other words, stop doing it)
> >
> > It was an entirely new topic actually.
> >
> >>  - dont hijack existing threads
> >
> > Again, it was an entirely new topic. You surely noticed that it had a
> > brand new subject and everything. I accidentally left a different
> > quote at the bottom because I used a different email to quickly set it
> > up to send to the list, but this should have been the very last thing
> > for you to see anyway.
>
> Mr. Bottle, let me attempt to explain the reason for Mike's reaction,
> because I just realized the problem as Mike sees it.  Email clients that
>  support threading, such as Thunderbird, Kmail, etc, show the threaded
> view by looking at the email headers, not the email subject.  When you
> decided to start a new topic, you did so by opening an existing email
> from a fairly long thread, deleting the contents and subject of the
> email and starting (what you thought) was a fresh topic.  Unfortunately,
> this REALLY screws up conversation threading in popular email clients.
> I'm using Thunderbird right now, and your initial email for this new
> subject displays as about the 30th email reply to a thread with subject
> "drobbins, leadership, etc.".  It took be a good ten minutes to even
> find your email in thunderbird, whereas in Gmail, it displayed as a
> totally new thread at the top of my list.  I guess Gmail doesn't honor
> email headers properly.  I didn't realize this until now either, and I'm
> sure I've annoyed the hell out of some people in the past also.
>
> >> no attempt was made to summarize anything at all.  the article merely
> >> linked to all existing posts made by Gentoo developers.
> >
> > They chose to use some opinion posts from developers to summarize the
> > debate, but only ended up giving one side of the story. ...
>
> There's really a few problems with your argument.
> 1. The "article" in question was not an article at all.  It was simply a
> collection of popular blog posts from the p.g.o. feed.
> 2. This discussion really belongs in an email to gmn-feedback, not on
> the gentoo-nfp list.  Although, you are talking about the foundation,

I have to agree it really has nothing to do with the foundation, we have to be 
ccarefull to not lump all of our smaller problems together because we are 
taking a bunch of  icecubes and trying to turn it into a glacier here.

> it's really a complaint about how you feel the GMN presented the
> information.  So, it's best sent to gmn-feedback.
> 3. If you feel so strongly, you should really write a proper article
> yourself and submit it to gmn-feedback for inclusion in the next
> newsletter.  The GMN really needs more people to participate and submit
> articles.  I'm sure a properly written article on this topic would be
> well accepted.
>
> @Mike
> Thanks for the link to the wiki article about top posting.  I've been
> doing this forever, and I never realized what the fuss was about.  The
> example signature in the article really drives the point home.  It's
> confusing as hell when someone top posts.
>
>
> -----------------
>
> John Alberts



-- 
Douglas James Dunn
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