Top Posting and Message Trimming - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

14 Jun 2006

Jules Richardson wrote:

...
  When all is said and done, the actual number of people
who think top-posting 
 is the right thing to do is *very* thin on the ground - but some popular 
 applications do force peoples' hands somewhat. 
As the saying goes: "posting at the top because that's where your cursor
happens to be, is like defecating in your pants because that's where your
rectum happens to be."

...
   I dislike
signatures, mainly because some claim corporate property or 
 confidentiality which makes little sense. There are a few that have 
 politically oriented signatures which has absolutely no place on the 
 list (ok, that one is policy-ish ;) ). If it was trivial to do, I think 
 I'd set the list to automatically remove all signatures  
 See my other post - problem there is that a fair number of posters *do* 
 include useful, legitimate contact details in their sigs. Often that may be 
 something as simple as info on how to remove any spam traps from their 
 displayed email address. 
My own signatures are mostly just things I find funny, thought-provoking,
somewhat important, or otherwise worthy of randomly inserting at the very
bottom of my emails, denoted by an appropriate seperator, of course.

Some may find some of my signatures offensive for reasons religious or
political, but "feh!" I say to that. I was taught that (the contents of)
signatures are off-limits for dicussion. Dunno what, if any, RFC that is in.
If it isn't in one, it should be. The sig file represents our fifteen pieces
of flair. We do want to express ourselves, don't we?

I do take care to add at least some rudimentary contact info (or a plug
for my own site which hardly deserves plugging) to them, though. Fot that
reason alone I am of the opinion that sigs shouldn't be stripped. They are a
minor inconvenience at worst, and a welcome diversion from heated discussion
that reminds us all that there is more to life than banned substances in
components and the proper use of IC sockets, at best.

...
  I'm sure it's possible to strip sigs - even if
it's a tweak and recompile of 
 the mail list software - but it's a potentially bad thing to do even though it 
 would get rid of the moronic junk that some companies insist on adding to 
 employee emails :-(

 Actually, dumping any sig with the word 'confidential' in it would probably 
 nuke nearly all the legalese ones, and dropping any with 'virus' in would get 
 the ones inserted by AV software (despite this list being text-only and so the 
 info is unnecessary) :-)

 So it probably *could* be done. Is it worth the effort? No. :-) 
Hear, hear.

,xtG
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