Posting from Google Groups

Many people find reading the comp.lang.python newsgroup / python-list mailing list on Google Groups to be simple and convenient. It is also possible to post messages to the list from there. But please be aware that your message will be read by many people using mail or Usenet clients, not Google Groups. Posts from Google Groups have some problems that may make your post difficult or annoying to read by these other list participants, and all would appreciate it if you would fix them before clicking the Post button.

1. Please remove extra blank ">" lines.

• When you reply to a message Google Groups includes the message you are replying to prefixed (aka "quoted") with ">" characters. This context helps the reader of your reply understand what the discussion is about. The problem is that Google Groups adds a number of empty lines with nothing but ">" characters. For example:

  >
  > When I changed it so that it said class Foo(object) it gave me
  >
  > a traceback error when printing out the results. Any ideas?
  >
  > >
  >
  > > The code is at http://somewhere/strange
  >

  When reading messages on Google Groups, such quoted text will often be collapsed in a "-show quoted text-" link and not bothersome but others will see them all the time. Reading a message formatted this way is annoying and there are readers who will ignore it or complain about it. You should remove the excess quoted blank lines before posting. There are several way to do this.
  1. If the quoted text is short, just removed the excess quoted blank lines by hand. (Proper netiquette requires you to remove parts of the quoted text that aren't relevant to your reply anyway which will lessen what you need to fix.)
  2. Open a New Mail Message compose window in your favorite email program. Then copy the text of the original message (not the screwed up quoted message in the Google Groups compose window) and use your email program's "Paste as quotation" function to paste into the email window. You can then copy and paste the properly quoted message back into the Google Groups post window.
  3. Do the same as above but with your favorite text editor program and use your editor's Replace function to add the quote markers yourself.
  However you do it, the context lines above should end up looking something like:

  > When I changed it so that it said class Foo(object) it gave me
  > a traceback error when printing out the results. Any ideas?
  >
  > > The code is at http://somewhere/strange

  Please do not simply remove all the context -- in a moderate to high-volume group, context is very important to readers of your post who may have long since forgotten the message you are replying to.

2. Please don't remove attributions.

• Attributions are at the top of the context lines and say who posted the message(s) you are replying to. They look like:

  On Saturday, October 26, 2013 7:02:19 AM UTC-6, Ben Finney wrote:
  > On Saturday, October 26, 2013 10:33:10 PM UTC-6, ru...@yahoo.com wrote:

3. Not all list readers may see your post.

• Because of the above problems, the amount of spam posted via Google Groups and other reasons, there are some regular and knowledgeable list participants that filter out posts made from Google Groups. It is not clear that more than a few people do this and most posters from Google Groups get good responses. If you want every possible person to see your post you may want to try posting using one of the other methods described in CompLangPython.

4. Follow accepted mailing list netiquitte. These are conventions that all posters should try to follow, they are not specific to Google Groups posters. See for example http://linux.sgms-centre.com/misc/netiquette.php. Three in particular often complained about when ignored are:

• Please don't top post. Either put your reply text below any context text, not above it, or interleave your reply text within the context text by inserting each part of your reply immediately below the particular part of the context text to which it applies.

• Please don't type in lines longer than about 70 characters or so; type your <enter> key when your line gets around that length. Older mail clients and the Python maillist archives won't automatically wrap such long lines making them hard for others to read. Exceptions of course are things like long urls which would be broken by manually wraping, or quoted text (you are responsible for your text, not that of others.)

• Remove (trim) context that is not relevant to your reply.