[wellylug] Signal to Noise ratios

[Tony Wills]

At 18:34 16/04/04 +1200, Caleb Gilmour wrote:
>To all you top-posters, here's an email signature someone used to have at 
>work
>(and you've probably seen it before):
>
>A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
>Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
>A: Top-posting.
>Q: What is the most annoying e-mailing habit?

I thought the most annoying habit was people who complain about other 
peoples email style (and or spilling ;)

I have no problem with posts where the reply is before the quoted message 
except where the reply is just a one liner and I miss it as I scroll down 
and end up scrolling up and down the message trying to spot the 
reply.  Usually I only read the quoted bit if I need to work out the 
context of the reply ie after reading the reply, it doesn't really matter 
where the quoted bit is.

Then I've also had interesting email conversations with people where I've 
replied point by point in-line and they've obviously only noticed the last 
point.  And of course my favourite is when I posted a 1000 line transcript 
(of a Goon Show) and somebody replied with a one word comment ... after 
quoting the whole of my message :-) ... (of course I'm not complaining ... 
that's just their style ;-)

--- Tony

PS This topic is of course 100% noise as far as the purpose of this mailing 
list goes.
PPS Who runs debian.orcon.net.nz and why are they collecting a complete set 
of Goon Show mp3s?
(make that 110%, what do you mean off topic ???? ;-)