Mark announced awhile back that he would include a feature that allows premium groups to maintain/access member pages for past members. Instead, he seems to have created access to a list of email addresses of past members. There's still no way to see any of the members' activities, let alone their member pages. The list entries are not clickable, and you still have to search (often vainly) through the activity history to find whatever the member did. Even their +owner messages are gone: I found an entry in the group activity, by searching explicitly for +owner messages, a +owner message from a past member. The message looked clickable, and i thought that would be a way in, but clicking on it just took me back to the group home page. These members seem completely inaccessible as before.

I voiced a mild query (complaint/suggestion) about this on beta a few weeks ago but heard nothing back from Mark. Does anyone know the status of this? Is it still on trello, or does Mark consider the "past members" list (which is virtually useless) the implementation of it?

I remember that before Mark agreed to add the feature (in the "old days," he was going to do it for all groups, not just premium), the idea was to be able to more easily access the activities of past members, because the member page goes away. Someone at the time (this was in beta), possibly Mark, said it was easy to find their activities anyway by doing some search or other. That has never worked for me, because a search by email address on the group activity log fails. It just returns the entire activity log. So if this feature is no longer in the works, or if (god forbid) Mark considers it "done" by virtue of the "past members" list, does anyone know how to find all activity of a past member?

J

On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 08:02 am, Shal Farley wrote:

You might have a look at the "Normalize HTML Emails" option in the Message Formatting section of your group's Settings page. If you have that box checked then color or font changes won't be shown on your group's messages on site.

Thanks Shal for your comments. FWIW, I don't have the Normalize HTML Emails box checked.

I've asked the member to identify which messages are causing him problems so we'll see what that reveals.

John P

Shal and John,

I don't think "normalize HTML" would have anything to do with this.?

I'm no email guru, but I think the purple color comes from the email server seeking to distinguish quoted text from non-quoted text, depending on what it receives from , not from any purple color the *user* sends on the front end.

i've determine that the strip-HTML setting, however, DOES affect what's going on. I'm not sure it applies to John's member's situation, but as I said, if the group's strip-HTML setting is set, then my gmail does not distinguish the quoted text in purple. I've surmised that's because "processes out" the '>' signs, leaving gmail unable to see that the text was quoted material.

J?

On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 11:42 PM, John P <vantravel50@...> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 08:02 am, Shal Farley wrote:

You might have a look at the "Normalize HTML Emails" option in the Message Formatting section of your group's Settings page. If you have that box checked then color or font changes won't be shown on your group's messages on site.

Thanks Shal for your comments. FWIW, I don't have the Normalize HTML Emails box checked.

I've asked the member to identify which messages are causing him problems so we'll see what that reveals.

John P

Shal, here's what I've noticed since my last post. Suppose I use block-quote on the web to indent text consisting of the part of a message I want to respond to. There are two cases: 1. The group has 'strip HTML set and 2. It does not have that set.?

First, note that I can still essentially/implicitly invoke the block-quote function of the editor ,even in a strip-HTML group, by selecting and copying a portion of the message I'm replying to before I hit reply. In my draft of the message, the quoted text appears indebted with '>' signs to the left. But in the web version of my message, the quoted text shows up as usual, without the symbols but with the same vertical line at left that appears in a non-strip-HTML group.

Where it gets weird is with email versions of my message. I am using gmail, so I don't know how much of this applies to other email servers. But here's what I see consistently:?

In the strip-HTML group, the quoted text -which, as I said, appears indented with a vertical line at left, as one would expect - instead shows up in the email version with the quoted text nicely in purple. Readers can easily distinguish the quoted text from my my response immediately below it. All is fine and well.

However, in a non-strip-HTML group, the email version of my message utterly fails to separate the quoted text from my response below it. Even the line space that appears between the two in s strip-HTML group is missing.?

This is the case (because my group is non-strip-HTML) that I normally see, and which got me to finally resort to italicizing and putting quotation marks around the quoted text when I reply to a message, EVEN IF I am responding via the web.

I'm not sure what's happening, but I'm guessing that the '>' symbols for the indentation in a strip-HTML group are a sign to gmail to handle the text as quoted. But in a non-strip-HTML group, gmail has already performed that interpretation and that function, and has therefore gotten rid of the symbols by the find gmail gets the message, so gmail really doesn't know that it should distinguish the quoted text by making it purple.

Does that make any sense?

J

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 17, 2017, at 8:40 AM, J_Catlady <j.olivia.catlady@...> wrote:

Shal,

As you've noted, two issues here. I've always been annoyed by the top-posting algorithm's overzealousness, hiding ANY quoted material, not just prior posts but eve purposely quoted text from another source. I've resorted to inserting any sort of bogus text after a quote in order to foil it, but often I forget. It seems that nothing can be done about this. I know Mark has tried, according to what he's said in the past.

As for the gmail phone app, mine evidently behaves differently than yours, for some odd reason. Gmail does make quoted material purple on my Mac, but not on my iPhone. Before I resorted to italicizing the quoted material and even sometimes explicitly putting quotes around it, I used to see my versions of my posts on my phone beginning with statements that I utterly disagreed with and was about to counter, with those statements looking like I was the one saying them. Now, as i said, I work around that.

J