Build Date & Platform Bug Found: Linux commercial seamonkey build 1999-12-06-08-m12 installed on P200 RedHat 6.1 Overview Description: The user pref "user_pref("mailnews.reply_on_top", 0);" sets whether the cursor is placed above or below the quoted text when you doing a mail reply. Setting the pref to zero places the cursor below the quoted text and setting the pref to one places the cursor above the quoted text. This occurs under POP or IMAP. It also occurs on html and plain text editor. On win32 and Mac, the default setting is set to 1. On Mac it set to 0. I believe the default be the same as win32 and mac. On Communicator 4.7, the default behavior is to place the cursor above the quoted text. Steps to Reproduce: 1) Edit the prefs.js file 2) Search your prefs.js file for this user pref. user_pref("mailnews.reply_on_top", 0); 3) If you find this statement, delete the line 4) Start Messenger 5) Open Inbox (POP/IMAP) 6) Select a mail message 7) Click on the reply button off the toolbar A compose is open. The text is quoted but the cursor is placed below instead of above quoted text. Actual Results: On linux, when you reply to a mail message, the default preference is to place the cursor below the quoted text. Expected Results: All the platform should behave the same. I believe users are used to 4.7 behavior where the cursor is placed above the quoted text. Additional Builds and Platforms Tested On: The builds I tested on win32 and Linux were: Win32 commercial seamonkey build 1999-12-06-09-m12 installed on P166 Win98 MacOS commercial seamonkey build 1999-12-06-08-m12 installed on G3/400 OS 8.6 Additional Information: On unix 4.7 builds, this user preference was not implement. We did not allow users to set where the cursor is placed when repling and quoting a mail message. It placed the cursor below the quoted text. Bug found verifying bug 18723. Assigning bug to Seth because Jeff and Rich (I believe) don't have a linux machine.

Changing qa assigned to pmock@netscape.com

moving to m14.

accepting.

This doesn't sound super-serious, but I'm pretty surprised that the default prefs *could* be different across platforms, so I'll leave this at M14.

Changing summary from "cursor" to "caret"

marking p2

M15

I think this `bug' is deliberate -- a similar difference in default behavior between Unix and other platforms was introduced when reply-above-original quoting began in Communicator 4.03 (or so Akkana tells me). The reason being that Unix users in general tend to be less happy with reading messages in reverse than users of other platforms, and thus less tolerant of the Jeopardy-order quoting style (answer first, question second, and no snippage at all) than users of other OSes are. My preference, obviously, is for Mac and Windows to be brought into line with the Linux setting, and not the other way around. (That way, using Netscape 5.0 on Usenet, with default quoting options, won't be the equivalent of wearing a `kick me' sticker.)

I hate reply-on-bottom since people who refuse to snip their quoted material force me to read through acres and acres of quoted stuff that I've already read once *for every message in the thread* just to get to their two lines of new reply on the bottom. I know the GNKSA disagrees with me, but I don't care. I've even lost interest in arguing about the default setting. I'll change it to reply-on-top as soon as I install it, so make the default whatever you want.

moving to m16.

Maybe, we can decide this on .mail-news? My personal opinion: "Caret before quote" being even default encourages bad behaviour. I see Phil's point, but *I* scroll the msg down in both cases, because I always expect something below quoted text.

Having the replies first makes editing to partially elide quoted material and only respond to specific sections very difficult. Independent of my personal belief that quoted text should come first, at the very least this needs to be context sensitive: ie, on Usenet, putting reply text first is very bad form (as alluded to earlier in the mention of the GNKSA), so for news, quoted text needs to be first.

Well, I raised this issue on n.p.m.mail-news, and there were a grand total of two replies -- both requesting that the default setting should be for the reply to begin after the quoted text. So, given that (a) replying below the quoted text is the both the GNKSA-preferred option and the option preferred (apparently) by the majority of those mail-news developers who care about it, and (b) corporate types can easily change this pref, if they really want to, before distributing their customized version of Mozilla ... ... I'm resummarizing, changing platform/OS, and marking this bug as a blocker for the GNKSA tracking bug (bug 12699).

I just wanted to say that your posting to mail-news was not for naught, as I only knew to come add comments to this bug because of that posting. Thanks!

Adding mysellf to CC /Tobias

while I didn't find it in the gnksa, it is on http://www.xs4all.nl/~js/gnksa/Evaluations/netscape-communicator-4.5.txt "Netscape has adopted a extremely bad quoting convention as the default: instead of encouraging the highly desirable `phone conversation' style of interlining at the appropriate places (and removing irrelevant material), it puts the insertion point above the quoted text. Apparently this is done in conformance to existing other software (of the `groupware' type, based on the mistake of mapping concepts onto mail/Usenet that do not translate well at all). On Usenet, other needs have given rise to standards in reply message composition that are flagrantly violated by this ill-behaved followup creation strategy. This broken quoting convention causes trouble: confusion (it is unclear to which part of the quoted text the new material applies to), excessive quoting (people aren't made to understand that editing out the irrelevant material from the quoted material is important), and irritation (because of aggravation because of this bad behaviour, causing more confusion as well as more irritation in its turn). A copy of this review has been sent to the developers" fair enough. eventually, we'll get the mozilla newsreader that gnksa.

tobais, this change also makes the default in mozilla/modules/libpref/src/unix/unix.js redundant, it should also be removed: pref("mailnews.reply_on_top", 0); re-assigning bug to tobais.

I've tested tobais's patch (plus the change to unix.js I suggested) and it works. marking fixed. there is UI in the prefs dialog to control this, so if you really hate it, you have a way out. I'll also send mail to the n.p.m.mail-news alerting users.

Sorry for getting in on this late, but I only became aware of this recently. From a usability perspective, I think the carat should default to the top when replying to a mail message. I understand that there are certain 'correct' behaviors as defined by the technical community, but I don't think that defaulting the carat to the bottom is the most usable default behavior for the large quantity of moderate users and the huge quantities of people who become new users every day. I think you will completely confuse less experienced people if the carat defaults to the bottom. These are the people who WON'T know they can go to preferences and change this behavior. At least the experienced/techy folks will know to look in prefs to switch this. 4.x defaults to the carat at the top for Mac and Windows. I don't think we should change that. Also, the other most popular email clients (non tech folks), OE and Eudora also default to the carat at the top of a reply.

I agree with Jennifer's notion as I believe for beginners and medium users there is less of a possiblity to get screwed. They are not going to find the caret below a long original text. I also do not understand the reason being to support users that will interline their anwsers into the quoted mail. Well this is somethig that requires some more serious editing anyway and thus does only apply to relatively advanced users. Finally I support Phil's notion of supporting the reader of a reply in not requiring him or her to scroll their way all the way to the bottom if the reply lazily just used the default position of the caret to write some lines of response. I also think that Netscape traditionally has a large audience whiches uses this product for email (most frequent activity on the net), but has very little interest in participating in newsgroups. For this users Newsgroups etiquette would not be a valid reason to make it harder to use the reply function. Those users also never used pine or other terminal based character mode programs to read their news mail so the precendent there is simply not valid for this audience. A pref will not help them either as they will likely not find it.

German, this is an controversial issue and most people agreed opon the "default below quote". So, what should we do with this now? I think, the idea behind "caret below quote" has aspects: 1. It doesn't introduce withspace for the caret before the quote, that I have to delete anyway in 90% of the cases. 2. (more important) It strongly encourages to edit the quote as the sender should be able to imagine, that a large irrelevant quote on the beginning of the msg is very inconvient for the reader. (For me and propably many others, they are inconvient regardless of the position, but this is harder to figure out.) As for Phil's request: We have a private discussion via email, and Phil seems to dislike reading *any* quote. Filed RFEs bug 35929 and bug 35930 about that. I see no reason, why discussion via email should differ from discussion via newsgroups. I think, if somebody quotes below new text, he/she can as well omit the quote (which might be wanted for private personal communication), and this is, what these users really want.

Ah, well, as for finding the caret: Do you seriously believe, a user won't find the caret, although it - is in the visible area - blinks (!) (assuming, he/she knows, what a caret is)?

My personal opinion is that atleast Mozilla (not netscape) should default with the carret below quotation. This opinion is base on the fact tha Mozilla is geared agains developers and power users and not the average user. I may or may not be a good idée for Netscape to default the carret to above quoatation. /Tobias

I don't think, making different decisions for Mozilla and Netscape 6 is a good solution. Would we have solved this bug that way in the beginning, we wouldn't have RFEs 35929 and 35930 now. "Don't do tradeoffs - find better solutions."

If the caret shows up at the end of a long text, the text is scrolled down by default and the caret is in the middle of the screen blinking (at the end of the quoted text). So it seems unlikely that finding the caret could actually be an issue. I'm a little surprised by the assertion that having the caret at the top somehow makes it easier for newbies. Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that this is true (and that this preference isn't purely a style issue)?

I was surprised by that assertion as well. A user who can't figure out how to position the caret by clicking the mouse is likely to have problems sending mail or otherwise using our product, no? I'm curious why the default for mail.auto_quote is true in the first place. If we're targeting users who can't find the caret or figure out how to reset it by clicking the mouse, we probably shouldn't quote the original message either: why not default mail.auto_quote to false and mailnews.reply_on_top to 3 (bottom), then more advanced users who want to quote messages can decide the quote style at the same time they're setting their pref to auto-quote.

How many of you are really typical users? Our experience with Email and news is not that of a typical user. So what we have to do is ask them or look at the user data we already have. The surveys we have of Email use shows a few things. There are more of them (users of non-technical background) than there are of us. Most of our users reply with short messages of a few lines at most. Users do not edit their replies. Most of them do not use Newsgroups. Most users don't know what Unix is. So if we choose one carret location for both Email and News it should be the right way for Mail not News. Most of the messages replied to are replied to with short messages of a few lines and the origional text is left unedited. Why you ask, because they don't want to edit it. Either they do not feel it is necessary, they just don't want to, or they don't know how. Encouraging them to do so is making them work harder. Now we may want to put the carrot at the end and edit to our hearts delight. But we can't expect our users to want to do this as well. The larger user groups Windows and Mac are already used to the carrot at the beginning. And it makes sense to them because they know what the message is about. They don't want to wade through the lengthy joke they sent to Ralph to find he replied "OH that was funny! Hows about a beer after work?" We need a better reason to change this than UNIX users are not tolerant of this, or we want to retrain users to do it "the right way". IF "Caret before quote" being even default encourages bad behaviour, why don't we just spank the user and get it over with. Now let's consider the reciever of the replied to email. They are most often familiar with the content before they recieve the message as most were copied or on the to list of the originating message. I know this is not the case with News as any one could be on it but as I said most typical uses do not use News. The user now wants to know the reply not the message. Remember advanced users have the option to change it. Novice and Intermediate users probably don't even know they can. It makes more sense to recognize that user behavior is probably entrenched in Carrot first because Eudora, Outlook, Outlook Express, CC:mail, & Microsoft Mail habituated them to this. (These in total have a large user base and legacy.) Whether this was a good thing or not, is beside the point. We have to design for their present behaviors and expectations. There is no bad behavior for users only bad interfaces.

Please continue discussion on .mail-news in thread "Replying before/after quoted text". Tnx.

German, Jennifer, Lake: if you still want to change the default behavior, then please respond in n.p.m.mail-news to the points raised in n.p.m.mail-news about why you shouldn't. Otherwise, this bug is fixed and should be marked as such. Meanwhile, the latest version of Outlook Express -- OE 5.0 for MacOS -- has reverted to a default of beginning replies below the quoted text. <http://www.xs4all.nl/~js/gnksa/Evaluations/ms-outlook-express-5.0.1513.txt>

Putting myself on cc list since I'm doing a run-through of defalt pref values for mailnews. Note to self and pmock: our current 6/01 mail pref spec shows default for all platforms to "above the quoted text"

qa contact to Asa per conversation with Asa.

M16 has been out for a while now, these bugs target milestones need to be updated.

updating qa contact

not going to happen for ns 6.0 rtm.

The general consensus of the discussion on the newsgroup seemed to be that it needed to be changed... Is it going to happen or not? Either way, this seems like something that could be resolved one way or the other without too much trouble, doesn't it?

Default in Mozilla is to reply after quoted text. Resolving worksforme.

mpt: this bug is PP Linux. If you weren't testing linux we have a problem. Would someone w/ linux verify or reopen?

I still see this problem on commercial linux build 2000-122708-mtrunk. Re-open bug.

Default in Mozilla is to reply after quoted text. Default in Netscape builds is to reply above quoted text.

What's the state of this bug? Doesn't Mozilla default to reply after quote on all platforms now? Here's what defaults/pref on Linux says (from nightly build): [pref]$ grep reply * mailnews.js:pref("mail.identity.reply_to", ""); mailnews.js:pref("mailnews.reply_on_top", 0); // 0=bottom 1=top 2=select+bottom 3=select+top unix.js:pref("mailnews.reply_with_extra_lines", 0); I don't want to reopen the discussion about this /subject/, but if Mozilla defaults to reply after the quote, that's about as much as we can do. As much as I'd like to, we cannot force Netscape to use the same default. So, if my assumptions are correct, this bug is fixed, not? I still think, that Netscape should use the same default as Mozilla, but this bug is probably not the right way to achieve that. A better way might be to read the relevant discussion here and on .mail-news and then come up with some new ideas on how to solve all interests at once. IMO, the newsgroup .mail-news is a better forum to discuss that than this bug.

The default pref is to reply after the quoted text, so this bug is fixed. If this somehow doesn't work on Linux (as mentioned above), someone should open a bug about that. Marking worksforme.

Verified commercial builds win, linux and mac verified mozilla linux build.

Another of my late passerby comments.... I wish people would read up on Usenetiquette before they argue over how a newsreader ought to behave! According to several guides, starting the cursor at the top is sensible, since it is in a position ready for the user to trim down the message and interleave responses as is the accepted practice. See also http://smjg.port5.com/faqs/usenet/quote.html However, this is no use if the luser doesn't know this. This is another place where Usenetiquette violation warnings are a should-have feature - to advise anyone who top-posts or quotes excessively of what should be done instead.

Kicking back in about that last comment ... for further facilitation of the 'start at the top and work down' protocol, please see bug 227376.