On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 5:49 PM, Dwight Hutto <dwightdhu...@gmail.com> wrote: >> honest. How do you feel? Interesting... >> > Um, I guess like an inconsiderate bandwidth hog, but from now on I'll > trim more text.
What you may have missed was that that was a quote from Princess Bride. Don't take it personally :) > First it was too little, and now it's too much. > > I just tend to cut out some or all depending on the scope of the conversation. > > If I just hit reply all, and send it out, it's not intentionally to > use all of the text, and utilize the extra space, it's just a > response. It's all a question of courtesy, and there's no hard-and-fast rules. But as a simple rule of thumb, assume that your post is going to be read completely without any surrounding context; will it be comprehensible? > If the conversation is kind of just a few people, then I trim pretty > much everything, which apparently set a guy name mark off, who I was > polite to, but I'm not going to get slammed for a few simple posting > mistakes, and more than likely a few of his aliases, or the group he > tends to cheer up with. There's actually no such thing as a conversation of just a few people, on a big list like this. Sure, there may be only a few contributors, but there are thousands - maybe millions - of readers. You're not being slammed, though. What you're seeing is a community doing its best to maintain itself. If we all sit silently, wishing our hardest that everyone would quote nicely, cite nicely, post without trolling, and be helpful, will it happen? (Those familiar with the Bible may note a similarity with some comments in the epistle of James.) There are two ways to ensure that the community upholds its standards: Kicking out everyone who doesn't measure up, or explaining to people and inviting them to participate. The first is a great way to have a tiny community with no growth. The second... is what you're seeing. :) Of course, there's a third option, which is to simply ignore everything and try to get on with life. That basically amounts to kicking _yourself_ out of the community, because you'll quickly give up on a forum in which everyone posts sloppily. And I'm sure you don't want all the experts to do that, because you're then left with a "blind leading the blind" mailing list... not particularly conducive to good code! > It's just a mailing list, lighten up because mistakes in posting will > happen, even by accident. Accidents are understandable, but getting defensive doesn't help :) Generally, people don't speak up until there've been several similar instances. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
