Don't use default Google Group client (was re:....)

[rusi]

On Saturday, October 26, 2013 8:10:16 AM UTC+5:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Your personal attacks are not appreciated. Why can you not accept that 
> people who post using GG's defaults cause pain and difficulty to many -- 
> probably the great majority -- of readers who use either the mailing list 
> or the news group to read this list? Don't you think that they are 
> entitled to complain when people repeatedly post double-spaced, hard to 
> read messages, or set the reply address wrongly, or include no context or 
> attributes, or all of the above at once?
> 
> 
> Do you really intend to say that we have no right to complain about how 
> difficult Google Groups makes it for us?

I think you are mixing up cause and effect, symptom and disease, Steven.

The symptoms are
1. Double spaced responses
2. Non/improper attribution
3. Generally idiotic behavior

The 'disease' is:

Google-groups is current technology whereas newsgroups/feeds etc is pre-www technology.

By fairly straightforward statistics -- you should know given the newest module in python 3.4 <wink> -- the probability of idiotic behavior in a bunch of children is going to be significantly higher than the same in a bunch of adults.

Google-groups consist of the 'children-population' (so to speak); newsgroups etc consist of the adult population with some exceptions.

The appropriate way of dealing with children is not to say "Dont be children!" but to say "This kind of behavior is unacceptable out here"

I feel the biggest negative consequence of the anti-GG rhetoric is that the bigger issue -- idiotic behavior -- is left unaddressed in favor of very minor local issues like double-spaced mails.




> So far Peter
> Cacioppi is one of those people. He has shown no inclination that he is
> willing to take the care to communicate well according to the community
> standards here, and he has shown a distressing tendency towards snarky,
> arrogant responses to polite requests to fix his posts. 

I think its fairly straightforward to fix these issues:
First (for complete newbies) one ignores the problem and engages/answers discusses
Then one mildly mentions that this -- double-spacing/non-attribution whatever -- is causing a problem; eg the footnote that Mark (used to) keep
Then more strongly
Then finally give no response to the question under discussion except to point out and underscore the idiotic behavior -- just make sure that the claim of Peter -- "this group is working for me" -- is not kept true.

tl;dr I think Mark's scoldings in this regard will work if they come not just from him but from any and every one.  They are likely to have a larger subscription if you would agree to change: "Dont use GG!!"
to
"Users of GG are requested to read and follow these instructions
https://wiki.python.org/moin/GoogleGroupsPython "