What's with the quoting (or lack of)?

[OG]

Personally, I see the problem as being the way that GG sets the coding of message replies, and only for some browsers. That doesn't seem like intentional functionality to me.

[Clive George]

Check out the OP - no mention of GG, only OE. The problem has become more common since GG is the source of the posts which OE can't cope with.

[Frank Erskine]

One thing that sometimes puzzles me is when _some_ replies to post "XYZ" appear as "Re: XYZ". It causes a great cockup in threading...

To me, such as "Re: XYZ" are more appropriate for emails, together with top-posting.

[chris French]

In message , OG writes

No it doesn't and it would be helpful if Google could change it so as the OE problem was bypassed, but the fault seems to lie with OE. There is no reason why it shouldn't put quote marks in just because of the differing coding. Other clients seem to mange fine

[dennis]

OE is an old, unsupported application. It has been replaced by the supported WLM. I don't appear to have a quoting problem using WLM.

[Mike]

It depends on how addicted to mouse clicking and mouse pointing you are. I find online forums and particularly the likes of google groups to have some of the very worst user interfaces ever implemented - not that there is a much better way when they insist on the use of a mouse for all navigation. 50 new messages in a forum across 10 threads might need 50 pointer movements and 50 mouse clicks and often many more clicks if threads are collapsed. For searching and archive retrieval they are good, but for every other usage they are IMHO hopeless.

Take Forte Agent in the versions up to 2.0 (the rest are IMHO bloated rubbish) Scrolling down a message, stepping to the next unread message, stepping to the next group, all done with a single press of the spacebar.

Retrieving new emails - I get a lot, with a control E, follow up usenet messages with an 'F' Lots of functionality is just a single or two key keypress away. The mouse can often stay unused for long periods of time except for occasional editing during message composition.

The same 50 messages across 10 threads referred to above (assuming you retrieve each thread individually) takes

1 mouse movement and click to select retrieve new messages 10 presses of the letter M to mark messages 1 mouse movement and click to retrieve new message bodies The above two steps can be fully automated with a single parameter change per newsgroup Then the use of the spacebar for all reading

The user interface is extremely fast and IMHO light years above what any forum software using a web interface offers.

Google Groups is on a par with Outhouse Express as a user experience, using a mouse and pointing just because you can, not because it makes the job easier or quicker.

[chris French]

In message , Frank Erskine writes

Isn't that pretty normal, pretty much all the followups I ever see are of that format.

Only for clients which rely on the subject for threading. If they use the references header then it threads fine

[Matty F]

Isn't it obvious to the OE poster that it is not quoting correctly? The absence of < at the front of the quoted lines should give a clue.

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , chris French writes

GargleGropes is badly broken. I often find body text attributed to someone other than the original poster, verified by fetching the same article from a proper news server.

Surprised no one has commented on this. It seems worse when you search for old articles.

[Jules]

Issues with typical web-based discussion forums:

1) Lack of message threading, so you have to waste time playing the "guess which message this reply is for" game. 2) High ratio of eye-candy compared to the information that you're actually interested in, which further wastes time. 3) Very little (as you mention) keyboard control, other than what the browser gives you for moving around (which isn't much). 4) Slow page load times. 5) No (sensible) way of archiving data locally - so if the site goes, so does all the data (some sites do make digest archives available, but that doesn't seem to be widespread).

It's amazing that people put up with such poor systems, until you realise that half the users have never known anything different, and the other half know that there's no alternative because discussion for their particular interest area is only available via the web.

(I'm going to start on top-posting next ;)

cheers

Jules

[Andrew Gabriel]

The header shouldn't be there at all -- has no meaning in News. News is transferred as 7 bit anyway, and not quoted-printable. So "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit" is benign, whereas "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable" is invalid for News, where is would imply the message body is encoded in a way which News doesn't allow.

quoted-printable has absolutely nothing to do with quoting text in replies; it relates to a method of transfering mail messages and preserving end-to-end formatting and 8 bit characters when transfering through mail systems which don't preserve formatting and/or 8 bit characters.

[Clive George]

GG puts it in...

If that's true, GG is getting it wrong.

That may be the theory. In practice, having that header in makes a difference to how OE quotes the text in replies.