Here’s the problem: not everybody gets to promptly read each message as it arrives in their inbox. I get home from work or wake up in the morning, and check my personal e-mail. There may be, say, 20 new messages in a particular thread. I start reading through them in the order they arrived and I get to the third message, whose writer, several hours ago, made a statement I would like to comment on. So I hit ‘Reply’, delete all of the original message, type my reply, and hit ‘Send’. Now my e-mail shows up in everybody else’s inbox as the 21st message. They open it up, read my reply, and say, “WTF is he talking about?” If they want to figure it out they can now go back through every previous message to see if they can determine who and what I was responding to, or, more likely and understandably, they will just continue on to the next post and forget mine.
I actually see this kind of thing all the time on a list that is set up through Yahoo! Groups, where each member of the group has the option of reading and posting either on the Group web site or via e-mail. People who read and reply via the Web site see their replies appended to the specific message they’re replying to. But then Yahoo! shoots off an e-mail containing the reply to me, and I receive it and have no context to figure out who and what the person was replying to. So I’m left scratching my head over messages that say something like, “LOL! That happens to me all the time!” That particular list has at least one member from somewhere in South America, and he apparently cannot check his messages every day. So when he logs in to the Web site he goes through everything that’s accumulated since he last logged in and replies to everything that catches his interest. I can tell when this happens because I’ll receive a whole batch of e-mails from him, each containing a one- or two-sentence reply to … something I can’t figure out, usually because it’s from a discussion that was over several days ago. If these messages simply quoted what he was replying to, it would be easy to figure out.
Keep in mind that things like network problems can also affect the order in which messages arrive. E-mail discussion lists and Usenet groups, like Internet forums such as the SDMB, do not present “real-time” conversation, and so little reminders/quotes are needed to make it clear what’s being talked about. “Voice recorders and replay devices” are unnecessary in real-time conversation; their equivalent is essential in non-real-time discussions.
Why not, when it produces exactly the same result as somebody replying to an e-mail in an ongoing discussion without providing context? The point is that it’s confusing as hell to read.
And I’m not sure what you mean by “Email logs of online message boards”. With Yahoo! Groups, some people read and post strictly on the Web site (which is not set up like a standard message board - it’s more like YouTube comment-style) and some people read and post strictly via standard e-mail.
Reading you own description how your group works, the problem seems to arise exactly because of this : participants using the web frontend see the whole sequences of postings as on a message board and behave this way, writing messages with just “LOL”. The context is visible on the message board, since the preceding messages can bee seen even if they are not quoted, but not to the people who just get the emails. They don’t have the context.
It looks to me as if the two types of communication cannot be compared.
I don’t really know how to make my point more clear. In billfish678’s post he said:
He is talking about e-mail. So am I.
I suppose I just confused things by using Yahoo! Groups as my example. I only used that example because replying on the “forum” produces the same result as somebody replying to an e-mail without quoting what they are replying to.
Or to put it another way, I subscribe to three different, high-traffic e-mail lists, and the members of those lists are all generally smart enough to quote what they’re replying to (the biggest issue on the lists is getting people to trim the quotes down to just the specific bit they’re replying to rather than quoting the entire message). So when this one guy on the one list replies via the Web interface rather than via e-mail, it produces messages with no contextual clues which means confusing messages.
The specific point is not that that guy is seeing something different from what everybody else is seeing. It’s that his context-deficient posts — which is how they appear in* e-mail* — illustrate what would happen if people didn’t quote what they’re replying to.
But, my point is, that even this guy would quote preceding messages when his own messag is a sole “LOL”, if he didn’t use the message board put plain email.
I also hate bottom posting in email: usually I already know what a reply or follow-up email was in response to, like I’ve already read the earlier portion of the thread, and I really don’t like having to dig down in the message to find the new content. For work sometimes I’ve had to used a Outlook web client, and it infuriatingly defaults to bottom-posting-- since I’m not a true touch-typist, I’ll find myself halfway through my reply, look up, and realize I’m bottom-posting myself! And then have to cut-and-paste it to the top again…
