On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 6:10 AM, Stroller <strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk> wrote: > > On 19 Jan 2009, at 20:36, Grant Edwards wrote: > >> On 2009-01-19, Allan Gottlieb <gottl...@nyu.edu> wrote: >> >>> I would favor the original (with Alan McKinnon's change). It is >>> somewhat wordy but this issue has caused several users grief and the >>> (admittedly repetitive) original wording makes it very clear what must >>> be done and gives some idea of what caused the change. >> >> Being somewhat repetitive was was intentional. It's sort of >> like the redundant information in an error-correction code. It >> reduces the liklyhood of being misunderstood - > > It's also more likely to get skipped over & to cause busy administrators' > eyes to glaze over. > > I'm all for being explicit, but verbosity for its own sake is not beneficial > - with excessively long messages I often tend to find that I have to read > them over several times to make sure I'm understanding it properly. "WTF?!?! > Are you REALLY telling me the same thing three times?" > > A short concise note is more likely to make sense and get the point across. > Assuming it is written in English - which the original, of course, was not - > a short note will feel logical to the reader and he or she will know > immediately how to respond to it. > > But, hey! It's your bug. File it. The longer it's left unfiled the less > relevant this discussion becomes. You asked for opinions - just make sure > the subject line of your bug report explains the problem clearly ;). "ewarn > message is poor English, doesn't make sense" is my best suggestion. > > Stroller.
Maybe a compromise would be a short "you should do the following steps now" message suffixed with a "for more information, follow this link (to a bug/forum post) that explains why".
