

‘Reply above this line’ culture must die - prateekdayal
http://teamblog.supportbee.com/2011/09/12/reply-above-this-line-culture-must-die/

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davux
I'm confused as to why this is really a big problem. Sometimes, people really
muck up replying inline, and it is somewhat harder to find their comments, vs.
having their comments completely seperated from the previous message. Perhaps
it depends on the class of user that you are serving, as well.

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bitboxer
I worked in a M$-Shop for a long time. It was a huge problem there because Ms
Outlook didn't do inline correctly. The inline text was in another color. And
using a Linux Client you could only get the plaintext version without the
color in it :( .

Basically I had to use a VM just to understand the mail correctly.

~~~
davux
So using colors is bad? What is the right way to do inline? Or is the problem
that Exchange wouldn't let your Linux client get the full version?

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2muchcoffeeman
It's not the colour per se. Some email clients when not using plain text end
up formatting your reply in the same style and colour as the quoted texted.
The formatting may get lost on other email clients.

This is why I always use plain text so I get '>' infront of each line of
quoted text.

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tzs
The author seems to think they want to have a conversation with him. They
don't. They essentially have sent him a form to fill out, and they want the
answers together at the top because the answers are all they care about.

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yarone
Many years ago I tried and abandoned Zendesk for this very reason.

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nithyad
You may want to give <http://supportbee.com> a try!

Disclaimer: I am one of the founders of SupportBee

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gnu6
That's because you're not having a conversation, you're filling in fields in a
form. You're lucky they let you use email instead of redirecting you to a web
form that more rigidly enforces the method of interaction with them (which
needs to die even more).

~~~
prateekdayal
Not always true. I have had conversations with a lot of companies and they
genuinely wanted to talk and help but the top posting kept messing up the
flow.

There certainly are companies that don't want to engage in conversations but
there are quite a few out there that do care.

