On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 04:10:52PM +0000, Edward Taylor wrote:
I really dont want to see alug become a moderated list. One of the benifits of alug is that its a free forum where issues / comments are always responded to quickly. Moderation will reduce both of these aspects.
The alug list is moderated tho, you have to be a subscriber to post and you can only post in plain text. If you post using html or are not a subscriber then the email will get stuck in the moderation queue, which tends to get dealt with as and when an interesting mail appears, if i'm not about/busy etc. then the mail could sit there for several days. The reasoning behind this is to reduce spam, if the list wasn't moderated then you would all be getting 5 or 6 extra spams to this list a day.
Replying below is anoying because it means you have to scroll through a previous email that you have allready read, especially where there (may) be multiple of those. Culling of traffic is always good. Interleaving messages is always good.
Replying above and leaving the original message intact is the worst though, as I'm not going to bother reading it, if you must top-post then please just kill the last message so that you don't quote anything. The main reasons for bottom posting (well, it isn't bottom posting really) is that you answer each point logically so people can follow the flow of the conversation. If you are going to top post then I'm not going to be bothered to read the quoted text at the end of the mail, that would be really silly as it would be impossible to work out which bits you are replying to if there was a sequence of answers.
Adam