Re: Need for some guidelines to improve participation

[bill-auger]

i suspect the main cause of confusion is the mail clients people
are using - most web-mail clients for example, do a very poor job
at threading - if they are grouped at all, all messages with the
same subject are displayed as a flat stack, in the order of their
timestamp, with no indication of to which message it was replying

if that is the only sort of client, which people are accustomed
to, it would be expected that they do not realize how helpful a
native client with proper threading is

judicious quoting is very helpful - many message are being
quoted entirely, with small replies weaved in, top, bottom, or
middle - that is confusing, even for people who are very
accustomed to mailing list conversations

that again is something else that we can blame on web-mail
clients - those typically collapse the entire previous message,
effectively hidden from the user - then if the user does
not remember to expand it, and manicure it, the reply will
repeat the entire previous message (perhaps several previous
messages, if those in turn, repeated its parent message)

for example:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/repo-criteria-discuss/2021-06/msg00041.html

the message, which i am replying to now, is a good example - it
quoted only the precise comment, which it is replying to - so,
it is more obvious which point the sender was addressing,
regardless of the order in which the message was received

for example:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/repo-criteria-discuss/2021-06/msg00043.html

i hope some of these tips helped