Ruby on Rails Tuesday, September 1, 2015

> On Sep 1, 2015, at 1:06 PM, Elizabeth McGurty <emcgurty2@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have no idea as to what you are saying. I offer solutions voluntarily to the best of my ability. I am visually impaired because I cannot afford better eye glasses, so in response I write to wordpad and just respond.
>
>
> On Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at 12:04:37 PM UTC-4, Walter Lee Davis wrote:
>
> > On Sep 1, 2015, at 11:55 AM, Elizabeth McGurty <emcg...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Too existential for me... I just click the button...
> > All the best...
> > Liz
>
>
> Liz, are you stuck in the G-jail web interface, or the web view of Google Groups? Your desktop mail app can connect to Gmail easily, and this is a mailing list, first and foremost, and e-mail etiquette rules apply!
>
> Walter

No disrespect meant here, Liz — seriously, you do good work and have solved many problems for others on this list. I do not want to knock anything about your input here.

What Colin is saying (and I am echoing) is that when you reply to an e-mail, it is considered good "netiquette" to hit Reply, then move your cursor to below the previous poster's message body (or within it, if you need to reply to multiple points within that message body) and insert your reply inline with the part of the message you are replying to.

Since individual e-mail messages are normally read from top to bottom, yet each message piles up at the top of your inbox list (or Google Groups interface), there is a serious disconnect between what was asked and what was answered. Keeping the order of the previous thread linear within each message, like this:

[>>> Original question ]

[>> First reply ]

[> Follow-up question ]

[ Second reply ]

…maintains the flow of conversation and preserves context for those who are reading this entire thread later, and will naturally start with the last message first. Otherwise people have to scroll to the bottom and read upward to gain any hope of understanding what the conversation is about. It is also a good idea to snip out trailing auto-footers and extraneous materials, but at a minimum, resisting the urge (or technological imperative, in the case of Gmail's poorly-designed quoting tools) to top-post a reply should be considered the minimum. I realize I don't always do this properly myself, but I want to do better, and I hope to help others understand the reasoning behind that as well.

Thanks again for your efforts to answer questions on this list. I do appreciate it, and I am sure that others do as well.

Walter

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