Re: Preferred posting style

["Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de>]

<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

> On Wed, Nov 01, 2023 at 08:32:44AM +0100, Loris Bennett wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> Assuming the quoting of previous postings works (above there seems to be
>> a discrepancy between '>>' and '> >', although Gnus seems to handle
>> that),  is there some sort of 'bottom-postify' command which would
>> reorder the quotes?  I occasionally do this by hand if I find the text
>> makes no sense to me otherwise.
>
> ISTR there was something, not in the Emacs context, alas, and before
> the First Internet Supernova (aka roughly Y2K, when Google had the
> choice to either go bust or go evil).
>
> I guess it won't work, since proper "bottom posting" is a bit more
> than just putting the whole kaboodle above and your two lines below. 

That maybe true.  However, it would probably cover well over 90% of my
uses-cases.  Often someone sends me a message, I bottom-post an
interleaved reply, and then the other person top-posts their answer.  In
this case would be enough just to move the other person's singly quoted,
non-interleaved text to the bottom.

> It takes some involvement on the responder's side to pick and choose
> the parts of the message she's addressing in the response.

Once the blunt bottomification has been done, I can always delete stuff
that isn't relevant, although usually I wouldn't need to do that. 

> Perhaps, with a large language model...

Maybe, but then I would probably wait until one is advanced enough can
answer all my mail and deal with all follow-ups entirely on its own :-)

> More seriously: those are simply different cultures. I strongly doubt
> you can bridge that with "just" a technical device (although it may
> help sometimes).

As I think you said, the mixture of top- and bottom posting is the
worst, so it would be nice to have something to fix at least the simple
cases.

However I should probably raise the topic on the Gnus list rather than
discussing it any further here.

Cheers,

Loris

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