i need help from people all around the world please.

[mCowboy]

Typically, a “non-conforming” poster always has a reason for behaving the way he does: for example, it is a manifestation of his artistic soul, or individuality. The problem is that the other users may not see this greatness in all its artistic glory; they may just see a guy who is a bit lost and does not quite know how to use the discussion system. In systems which encourage following a good messaging style, a particularly stubborn “non-conformist” may quickly find themselves without a permission to post any new messages at all...

But all that should go without saying. Avoiding unnecessary distractions, such as non-standard markup, is just common courtesy towards the readers. There may be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people reading your posts. Whatever little time and effort you need to put in making your own posts neat and readable is surely much less than the collective effort of the readers who need to spend their time trying to figure out a badly written post, or reformatting it on your behalf when they’re replying to it. (And one is writing these messages for the other people to read – not only to oneself, I would hope.)

In the end, it’s not really about the technicalities or “conformism” at all, but about the general attitude and philosophy as regards to communicating with the others... in the lines of “Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”

hear, hear!!!

[littlefrank]

'these are some of the pics i've received so far:'

Very good.

[Rob A.]

Our littlefrank thinks "outside of the box" ...I think we have to tolerate each other's differences.

Actually, we don’t, if we’re The Administrator of a Discussion System. He who pays the bills makes the rules. [1]

Some discussion systems (or rather, their administrators) are known to actively discourage sloppy quoting practices and other forms of bad writing. This would include, for instance, long, monolithic messages without any paragraph breaks in them, or messages composed solely of lower-case letters. Or quoting the previous message without trimming down the quotes, or top-posting, or employing unconventional “personal” ways for marking up the quotes, etc.

Typically, a “non-conforming” poster always has a reason for behaving the way he does: for example, it is a manifestation of his artistic soul, or individuality. The problem is that the other users may not see this greatness in all its artistic glory; they may just see a guy who is a bit lost and does not quite know how to use the discussion system. In systems which encourage following a good messaging style, a particularly stubborn “non-conformist” may quickly find themselves without a permission to post any new messages at all...

But all that should go without saying. Avoiding unnecessary distractions, such as non-standard markup, is just common courtesy towards the readers. There may be dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people reading your posts. Whatever little time and effort you need to put in making your own posts neat and readable is surely much less than the collective effort of the readers who need to spend their time trying to figure out a badly written post, or reformatting it on your behalf when they’re replying to it. (And one is writing these messages for the other people to read – not only to oneself, I would hope.)

In the end, it’s not really about the technicalities or “conformism” at all, but about the general attitude and philosophy as regards to communicating with the others... in the lines of “Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”

_____
[1] No, I’m not one on this board... but I’ve been one in a couple of other places, and I’m still running a telnet-accessible “old-school” BBS system on my own.

Jukka...your posts are always a pleasure to read... So well laid out and logical ...and I suppose I must defer to that impressive and impeccable logic...

Leben und lassen leben??? Ich glaube nicht....Zu unordentlich!!!...

...now I wonder if we can peruade littlefrank??....hmmmm

[Jukka Aho]

...now I wonder if we can peruade littlefrank??....hmmmm

It would be a welcome development, of course, but I’m not holding my breath. :) You see, a direct confrontation is, psychologically speaking, always a bad move when discussing these matters, and here we already kind of got to that phase: there was an inquiry about the matter and a somewhat laconic, grumpy response – in the vein of I do what I want and I’m not going to change my ways or explain myself to anyone. :)

Now that such opinions have been exchanged, there’s the danger of losing one’s face if one would back off a bit – which is certainly not an insignificant motivational factor when dealing with people. And it is, quite naturally, inconvenient and irritating to be singled out for some little quirky trait or custom that is, after all, a relatively minor thing in the big picture (That is, if you choose a suitable big picture against which you can safely and conveniently compare it... say, children dying of hunger, nuclear warfare, global warming, or what have you... :)

On the other hand, it is often hard to completely avoid direct confrontation if netiquette matters are to be discussed or addressed at all. Sometimes people take any attempts at discussing them in a very personal way, and some of them start seeing red immediately when they think they’re being “given instructions” – so much so that they don’t quite see that it is not really about them, as people, but just about making the discussions more convenient and practical. (I’ve seen so much of it over the years that it has started to be kind of amusing; even adorable in a way... there’s often a certain “predictably grumpy and resistant” behavior pattern. :)

[littlefrank]

In answer to the 3 mouseketeers.

Jukka, I cannot actually remember you ever responding to one of my posts so...



mCowboy, We studiously ignore each others posts, so I cannot possibly think why you would want to criticize the way I post. A little less sarcasm to new members posts might actually help your self-proclaimed role as 'junior moderator'.


Rob A. You insult the majority of people on this forum by saying that they're not worthy of your self-proclaimed intelligence, and has I've never claimed to be a 'rocket scientist', I'm sure my posts are not worthy of your 'intelligence' so therefore you can find other options for your superior intellect.


To everyone else who loses sleep over the way I post. One of the reasons I post on this forum is because my written english, since living in Finland, has seriously declined, I blame Skype I never email/write letters any more, writing on the forum obviously helps, also eventually I hope to return to university, so at least I can say that 'I'm a Jack of all trades and a Master of one' so it's useful for me to use ' these' and "these" .

[Hank W.]

Here's one more
http://www.nullwave.net/cjdust.jpg

[Allard88]

Here's one more
http://www.nullwave.net/cjdust.jpg

The image is not working...

[mCowboy]

mCowboy, We studiously ignore each others posts, so I cannot possibly think why you would want to criticize the way I post. A little less sarcasm to new members posts might actually help your self-proclaimed role as 'junior moderator'.

I didn't criticize the way you post, I applauded Jukka's post, there's a difference. In order for the forum to work, the rules must be the same for everyone, including self-proclaimed anarchists. It's the same with the society.

Only reason I'd like to be a moderator, is to remove and ban the spam posts when they hit the forum. All other activity is to encourage people to be proactive when searching for information and not to rely on everyone else and adding to the burden of posting the same information over and over again, when all they have to do is to do a search with Google or within the forum.

[littlefrank]

'Members should post in a way which is consistent with "normal writing".'

'these' and "these" are "normal writing" I've been a member for three years now, I think I would have been 'moderated' by now if it was considered that it wasn't.



'Finland Forum discourages the excessive and continued use of negativity in posts.'

bb/viewtopic.php?t=27652


'3. Members are asked to not act as "back seat moderators". '


I've never described myself as an 'anarchist', if people ask what my politics are I say that I was an anarcho-syndicalist, but now I'm an anarcho-cynicalist. And anyway there is a big political difference between an anarchist and an anarcho-syndicalist.

Edited to say, I think we should go back to ignoring each others posts. Agreed?

[Jukka Aho]

Jukka, I cannot actually remember you ever responding to one of my posts

Consider that fixed now. :) (I’m not sure what that has to do with anything, though. This conversation has been about quoting practices; not about me and you.)

To everyone else who loses sleep over the way I post. One of the reasons I post on this forum is because my written english, since living in Finland, has seriously declined, I blame Skype I never email/write letters any more, writing on the forum obviously helps, also eventually I hope to return to university, so at least I can say that 'I'm a Jack of all trades and a Master of one' so it's useful for me to use ' these' and "these" .

Hmm... but no-one is trying to dissuade you from using the ordinary quotation marks and apostrophes for their normal everyday purposes.

What is being discussed here is the practice of marking up quoted snippets from the previous messages for the purpose of responding to someone’s comments, and continuing the discussion. As far as quoting is considered, this is a special case, and there is an well-established convention for it. Breaking that convention without having any particular reason for doing so is... odd.

The two main reasons why block quotes are the preferred way of marking up these kind of quotes are that they allow...

1. unlimited nesting: you can quote text that has already been quoted in the previous messages, this way creating multiple levels (or “generations”) of quoting. (Every so often you just need to quote text that is deeper than only one generation away in order to make the context of your reply more understandable to the reader.)
2. attribution: each level of quoting can be unambiguously tagged with the name of the person who originally wrote it (and this tagging even happens semi-automatically)

Moreover, block quotes are a visually discernible, clean way of separating one’s own text from that of the other writers.

Mere single or double quotes don’t offer these benefits. While they’re an important device in their own right, they’re generally not used in online discussion threads for marking up quoted text from the previous messages. (This is simply because the block quoting mechanism is already specifically designed for that purpose, and because it is also technically better equipped for it.)

Then again, the ordinary quotation marks are perfectly fine for quoted material that comes from some other source than the previous messages.

• • •

If you’re aiming to brush up your punctuation, I think there are better and less disruptive ways to accomplish that goal than trying to replace the standard nestable block quotes and their attributions with a non-standard convention.

What is more, if you want to study in a university, you’re probably better off learning how to block-quote properly, anyway – instead of just ignoring that practice – as you will be needing that skill at some point during your studies. (You’re surely going to be using some discussion forums maintained by the university, and by the student organizations. :)

Be that as it might, note that the straight vertical ' and " – which are the characters that you have been using for quotes this far – are not real quotation marks, but so-called “typewriter quotation”, or “ASCII quotation”. The real typographical quotation marks have a curly shape and a direction: the ‘opening’ quotation mark looks different from the ‘closing’ one. (If you look closely, you can see the difference between those characters in the above. Also see here, here, and here for more information.)

[littlefrank]

Yes I know, I already have a degree thanks.
Anyway I really can't be arsed with all this

[mCowboy]

Is it the case of old dog not learning new tricks?

[Jukka Aho]

Is it the case of old dog not learning new tricks? :wink:

I thought of something like that, then decided against it, since pressing the button and possibly deleting some unnecessary text is not a particularly difficult “trick”.

The explanation about having to practice the use of ' and " every day on a web forum (three years straight, in a constant, daily struggle of not forgetting about those two particular characters and their usage in the English language, and with the standard block quoting only being a regrettable casualty of that on-going battle) was kind of entertaining, though... even if a bit on the “far side”... so cheers to littlefrank for the chuckles. :)

[Rob A.]

The explanation about having to practice the use of ' and " every day on a web forum (three years straight, in a constant, daily struggle of not forgetting about those two particular characters and their usage in the English language, and with the standard block quoting only being a regrettable casualty of that on-going battle) was kind of entertaining, though

Jukka...now, perhaps, I'm being lazy as I could look it up myself, but I would be interested in your explanation of the use of ' and " . The company I work for produced a very good business English and "style guide" a few years ago...I'm sure it's in there.. And they didn't get too hung up over American spelling versus British spelling... To a large extent it's all optional now in Canada, though some people will argue vehemently for the British spelling... Is that "licence" or "license"???... Hey, I do know the answer to that one...


And, littlefrank, why so touchy??? The fact is I DO think you're a 'rocket scientist' and I DO think you're one of the forum 'intelligentsia'... And, I DO enjoy reading your posts...well, most of them...

But somehow I think you just aren't going to believe me ...and you'll either give me a poke or ignore me...

[Jukka Aho]

Jukka...now, perhaps, I'm being lazy as I could look it up myself, but I would be interested in your explanation of the use of ' and " .

Hmm... I don’t think I could top these three Wikipedia articles:

• Quotation mark
• Quotation mark, non-English usage
• Quotation mark glyphs

Or do you mean the Finnish usage?