527697 - Top Posting Warning

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Francois Cartegnie]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009102808 Mandriva/1.9.0.15-0.1mdv2009.1 (2009.1) Firefox/3.0.15
Build Identifier: 

Add top posting warning

Reproducible: Sometimes

Actual Results:  
Current default editing behaviour is to quote and place cursor at the bottom of the message "bottom posting".
Some people are using "top posting" anyway.

Expected Results:  
When bottom posting is configured in preferences, thunderbird should detect if the edited reply starts with new text instead of a quoted section and give a "top posting" warning to user.

This warning should be removable in preferences.
This warning should be mandatory for usenet posts.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Validating that the RFE is indeed unique - couldn't find any duplicates.

This sounds confusing to me as a user - I would get warnings a lot. And we would need to properly analyze the email being replied to. That starts to be tricky with long threads where people have mixed the reply style (top and bottom).

Bryan thoughts ?

Comment 2

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Message quoting is a per-account configuration so email and newsgroups can have different posting rules.  We could look into this for usenet specifically  because those areas have stict posting guidelines.  Email however is much more open so we couldn't add this kind of warning to those messages.

In general, because we default to bottom posting, if the user configured top posting I would think it's odd to warn them about top posting as it was a choice they already made in their settings.  We'd just be creating an extra speed bump to add a guilty feeling; people who are going to top post are going to do it.  I'm not sure if it's possible to have this kind of configuration on 'usenet only' posts vs. other newsgroups.