Most gratuitous comments

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2014 at 10:59 AM,  <sohcahtoa82 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> (By the way, whatever tool you are using to post comments is badly breaking
>> attributions. It is polite to give the person's full name when quoting
>> them, when they provide one, if not give their full email address.
>> Truncating their email address to a single letter before the "@" has no
>> useful purpose and breaks attribution.)
>
> I use Google Groups which seems to be pretty unpopular on this list.  Does it break thread organization?  Or is it really just a politeness thing?

It's about giving people proper credit for what they said. Compare the
two slabs of text that I quote above. One of them is clearly
attributed to a full email address (not a name, though it would have
been included if your post headers had provided one); the other,
because of the way I trimmed the quote, is completely unattributed.
You can't tell, from the above text, that the "By the way" parenthesis
was written by Steven D'Aprano. This is unfair on Steven, and unclear
for the next reader.

(Caveat: Responsibility for quoting is primarily on the *first* person
to make the quote - the first level of chevrons. It's somewhat more
acceptable to omit re-attribution, as in my example above. But when
you're directly quoting people, you really need to include info about
who said what.)

ChrisA