Most gratuitous comments

[sohcahtoa82 at gmail.com]

On Thursday, November 20, 2014 4:17:33 PM UTC-8, Chris Angelico wrote:
> 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

Fair enough.