[MUD-Dev] Attributions vs brainstorming ( or, Z, DOWN FOR THE COUNT! :) )

[Stephen Zepp]

Jon A. Lambert wrote:
>
> It is interesting that you seem to think that attributions are
> done for ego or idea ownership purposes.  This thought had
> never occurred to me until now.  I always thought this was for
> clarity, readability and courtesy.

Um, hmm....
1) I'm not the one complaining that something I said doesn't have my name on it.

2) Clarity? When I get a message from this list, I change my settings so that >> text is white on white, so I can _read_
the damn thing. I don't know, maybe I walked into a buzz saw here, but with one or two exceptions, I haven't been able
to trace a single person's thread of input through any of these posts that interest me, because of the techniques used
for attribution.  There was one person that had a way to set aliases for people's comments...care to share what program
that was, or did you do it manually each time?

3) Courtesy? I just don't see where this comes from. I spent 6 years working Special Operations, 3 of which was directly
for the State department working diplomatic issues.  One that that I've found is that a lot of misunderstandings and
conflicts have arisen because two parties were too "polite" and "courteous" towards each, other, masking any real
communication.  We're all busy, and with few exceptions, this forum is about our hobby.  We all have varied and
interesting backgrounds, and we all have our strengths and weaknesses. We all share an interest.  If I respond to a
post, or if someone responds to mine, that shows curtesy in my mind right there...they showed enough interest to take
the time to say "Cool idea!", or "that would suck, because of", or "have you tried". Maybe I'm different, but I look at
the information that's in a post, and if I don't understand a reference, I go back and check previous posts in the
thread ( sort by threads in my email app )  If I were to try to reference it with all these indents, I get lost counting
the number of > for each line.

> 
> What's even more irritating, is this post that I'm now responding
> to.  Formatted at 100+ characters and requotes an entire previous
> post for no apparent purpose.
> 

Hmmm..irritating.  Sorry to make you resize your window.  Doesn't matter that I have to play kindergarden at the
university level cut/pasting to make each post a work of art, but that's okay.  I don't mind, really.


Had hoped that this list would be worthwhile, replacing the flame-happy and braggards of the newsgroups, and be a forum
for intellectual, advanced and in some case heated debate.  Instead, I find that I'm told:
" What I'd actually recommend is that you just watch the discussion for a
while, and see the formats and patterns we tend to use, as is recommended
in the welcome message." [this quote cut from message written by J C Lawrence, in response to a post from Stephen
Zepp].  In other words, we don't want to hear from you until you conform. Sorry, didn't know this was a Communist
Revolution in progress...

In addition, I find a few posters that drive the threads, mentioning "I do this, or this is how it should be done" [too
minute to attribute], but never mentioning precisely what all these large words actually mean, or _discussing_ those
advanced and seemingly interesting topics.  At least I could enjoy JA on the newsgroups flaming other because they were
( in his mind ) idiots, instead of being teased by how much better everyone else's code is ( not that it is, but that's
what I hear from the list ).

Guess I'll go crawl back into my shell, and finish up those pesky ai nodes...
Z