We finally found the answer...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7534l8NdfpU

:-D

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

We finally found the answer... https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7534l8NdfpU

Well thanks Graham, but for the sake of those of us who keep our email etc. on a machine that doesn't conveniently do YouTube, would you at least care to post a summary and possibly a TinyURL? Or do your regular rants about netiquete only apply to other people?

The video is for Smart Mobile Studio. Not an Embarcadero product, IIRC.

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

We finally found the answer... https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7534l8NdfpU

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

least care to post a summary and possibly a TinyURL? Or do your regular rants about netiquete only apply to other people?

Where does that come from?

1) I posted to fpc-other, where anything goes

2) The message was short and to the point. Not to hog you precious hard drive space. The alternative would have been to attach a

1Mb file, which is not allowed.

3) The YouTube URL fits within the 70 char limit I set, which means I don't use TinyURL type services in such case (also what if that service goes down, then nobody knows what I posted).

4) The topic is very "visual" which cannot be explained in a text message. You must view the video to appreciated what I was trying to convey. If you can't view videos, don't make your problem mine.

5) I meant for it post to be humours, hence the use of a smiley face. No ranting here.

Now please, get a life...

Regards,
- Graeme -

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

1) I posted to fpc-other, where anything goes

[snip]

Now please, get a life...

Anything goes, except for insulting other people. And by putting yourself in the role of moderator on other lists and deriding people (rather than contacting the moderators and asking them to do something about it in a way that does not involve public complaining or flaming), it's normal that other people will become more easily annoyed by what you yourself do. Human interaction is a two-way street, aka karma is a bitch.

Jonas

Jonas Maebe wrote

yourself in the role of moderator on other lists and deriding people (rather than contacting the moderators and asking them to do something

I guess the moderators simply don't do the job they were assigned or volunteered for. 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?

flaming), it's normal that other people will become more easily annoyed by what you yourself do.

I still fail to see how my original message in this thread was an issue? I choose the right mailing list, and didn't include MB's of attached data.

It's not karma, just some people that are outright idiots.

Regards,
- Graeme -

No Graeme, YOU get a life. This is a mailing list, not a forum that's being read in a browser, and if you want to make your point please post URLs in a form that can easily be transcribed to a browser for cases where other people find it convenient to have the two on different machines or for other situations where cut-and-paste etc. don't work.

Note that I'm not finding fault with the point you're making, only with the way that you're presenting it.

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

It's not karma, just some people that are outright idiots.

That does it, you're back on moderation. Please grow up, finally.

Jonas
FPC mailing list admin

I must say, Mark and Jonas, you have just exhibited a serious lack of judgement and discipline.

I think the original post by Graeme had nothing wrong with it. Short, to the point, and including a short URL.

From the ensuing exchange it is clear you two are carrying over an attitude

from elsewhere and elsewhen that is not appropriate. In short, you have been unfair.

I stopped following the other fpc and lazarus lists because I was tired of this type of bickering. I only kept fpc-other because it was largely free of it. Now Mark and Jonas have spoiled even this list.

What a shame.

Doug Chamberlin wrote

I think the original post by Graeme had nothing wrong with it. Short, to the point, and including a short URL.

I agree. The moderation setting was in reaction to (a.o.) his subsequent messages.

I stopped following the other fpc and lazarus lists because I was tired of this type of bickering.

Then you also didn't see what lead to this (third time in the mean time, every time followed by a promise to behave according to the civility expectations of our mailing lists -- no matter how idiotic, soft or whatever he may find them) moderation setting for Graeme.

Jonas

I can see that your subsequent responses were a reaction to his subsequent responses. What I don't think you see is that you and Mark baited him into those responses and therefore should take the majority of the responsibility in the outcome (in this case).

---------- Forwarded message ----------

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?

You've previously said that you found excessive quoting irritating (you might have put it a bit more strongly than that) because you viewed messages in a browser: I believe that a number of people suggested at the time that that was quite simply your own fault for using the wrong tool for the job.

I agree that excessive quoting is to be avoided. However the reasons that quoting became part of the mailing list and (in particular) Usenet doctrines were (a) because certain brands of client software- in particular anything provided by Microsoft- were very poor as managing threading and (b) particularly in the early days messages were regularly lost or arrived out of sequence.

In fact it's not at all uncommon even today to find that messages are lost from a thread because they fail a gateway's acceptance criteria: suspect headers, attachments in a context where they're not expected, and so on. In other words it's still important that discussion groups of various forms be "self healing", and the conventional mechanism for that is by appropriate quoting including- and some people miss this out- a "So-and-so wrote:" line at the top of the body as well as possibly a "View this message in context" URL at the bottom.

But I'm sure that nobody not born yesterday didn't know that >:-)

Well, I don't understand this reaction?
It seem Jonas just wanted to provoke this kind of escalation. What was wrong with Graeme's mail?
He simply posted a link.
I don't get it.

It seems some people/moderators feel like god and want to show this clearly. This all started with Jonas' totaly excaggarated mail. Now suddenly Graeme is the evil thow it should be Jonas. Strange list moderation....

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

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?

Unreasonable? I just remember the days of Fidonet where more people adhered to netiquette. I guess it was contributed to the fact that messages had to travel via dial-up modems across the world [I was part of that process]. Millions of discussions happened every day, and simply quoting what was needed for context worked very well then. Why suddenly doesn't that work now?

Also take in consideration people with disabilities using something like screen readers. Having to sit for 15 minutes listening to 96+ lines of quoted text, just to get to the final punchline... the reply of 2-3 lines. And then this process happening for every single message in the FPC & Lazarus mailing lists!!!

Simply stripping out quotes take a mere second.

Regards,
- Graeme -

.
.

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

..

Points noted and generally agreed.

I didn't say it was inappropriate, I said that providing a TinyURL alternative would have helped people who- for some reason or other- couldn't cut-and-paste the full one. This is particularly the case for YouTube, which typically demands a fairly recent browser/Flash combination which might not be present on somebody's primary work computer. In the current case, Google doesn't throw up a link to that video on trivial searches (and more credit to Graham for finding and sharing it as a result) but there's no way that I- for one- am going to start trying to transcribe the entire URL to the laptop next to my main system during work hours: I've got much more important things to do.

Of course, simply putting up a TinyURL without explanation is at least as bad as posting a long URL which risks attracting enforced line breaks: I don't know about anybody else, but I'm blowed if I'm going to click on every URL I'm given whatever my level of safeguards :-) The ideal- and this is a convention that I'm used to from a private conferencing system I use- is to post the original URL, the TinyURL equivalent, and a very brief description... I was going to give an example from XKCD but I see that that already uses concise URLs, possibly because the artist has a clue.

So again, to avoid any possible doubt: I am not complaining about URLs in the general case. I /am/ complaining, politely as a non-moderator, about the assumption that a URL embedded in a mailing list message is appropriate or intelligible, although it's clearly not as bad as an animated GIF in somebody's sig.

And finally- and this one's for you Graeme- I wouldn't be complaining about the URL being less than useful if I hadn't made a minimal attempt to view it, on the basis that you're not a total idiot and might be making an interesting or at least amusing point.

Tomas Hajny wrote

- 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)

Please note:
I did NOT mention any names, so there was no finger pointing. I simply said it in a general term. Just like you would say "they are a friendly bunch of people" or "fishermen tent to stink" or "scientists are clever" or "programmers are a different bread". It's a general observation. Now if I said John Smith is an idiot - well, then that is a whole different matter.

Regards,
- Graeme -

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

I didn't say it was inappropriate, I said that providing a TinyURL alternative would have helped people who- for some reason or other- couldn't cut-and-paste the full one.

Well.. there's the flip-side which is more important: Sites that provide tiny/shortened URL services have a habbit of retiring/expiring thosed links after a certain period of time --leaving the referred URL going nowhere.

Perhaps you've never encountered such a situation but I have --several times-- found myself profusely employing profanities towards people doing just that.

Well.. if you have more important things to do, the first thing I'd expect you to do would be to ignore that link --which is exactly what I did--; plus, one would save more time by not complaining about a link posted in fpc-other.

And finally- and this one's for you Graeme- I wouldn't be complaining about the URL being less than useful if I hadn't made a minimal attempt to view it, on the basis that you're not a total idiot and might be making an interesting or at least amusing point.

Interesting approach indeed...

While I understand/realize that other people will/can have different approaches; If I had found myself in such situation, I'd have rather adressed my complaints at/to YouTube or the manufacturer of my device/os/software or even blamed myself for not having installed the necessary codecs or whatever..