I am not, nor ever have been, a top poster... ...Ooops. On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 07:26:23AM -0700, David Ellement wrote: > On 2007-09-14, Ben Gladwell wrote > > Maybe someone should explain to me what's so bad about top posting. > > Seems like a matter of preference to me. > > It *is* a matter of preference, as are good manners. Top posting puts > the burden of putting the poster's reply in context and logical order on > the readers; as such it is selfish behavior. Selfish behavior was once > considered poor manners, even rude. I am not, nor ever have been, a top poster. I would however just like to play Devil's Advocate for a moment and just point out a couple of examples where one might be grateful for it: When usenet newsgroups were more popular than they are now (and where newsgroup netiquette has a similar abhorrence of top posting) I would often find that a particular message had somehow not managed to make it through the replication process and onto the server that I was forced to use. Reading a nicely trimmed response to a message when you cannot read the original post was often maddeningly frustrating gobbledygook. In those circumstances I was often grateful for a lazy top poster who had the whole of the original message (and often the whole of the thread too!) beneath their "me too" comment at the top. Of course that circumstance doesn't hold true with a mailing list - usually. A week or so ago, when engaged in a fit of quite unnecessary tinkering, I managed to completely mess up my mail server. This resulted in the loss of about an hour's worth of emails. Shortly after I had restored normal service I received an email. I had placed a message in a mailing list. Someone had clearly made a full and detailed reply to my message and this email was yet another person making some neatly trimmed comments to the bits that interested him. I have still not plucked up the courage to admit that I never saw the reply to my post and I have no idea what was said! Of course these are really exceptional circumstances and should not be reason to change the preferred method of responding which is to trim and bottom post replies. But I just thought I would share that with the list. Another important consideration of netiquette is that one should never post a message that is off-topic for the list in which you are posting... ...errr.. Sorry! AD
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