[wellylug] "The quart-annual top-posting debate"

[Jim Cheetham]

Oddly, Phillip's comments actually read correctly to me initially ... 
it took me a few moments after hitting reply to realise that they are 
"the wrong way round" ;-)

For me, on a busy mailing list, top-posting means I don't have to 
scroll down into a message to see what's been contributed - I can see 
straight away if this is a serious or interesting post. Bottom posters 
who don't trim the old message out don't get read. Quit wasting my 
time, bandwidth, local disk storage, and mouse wheel ... my loss, 
perhaps.

Also, if the *thread* is busy, I already have the complete state in my 
medium-term memory. I don't need to read interspersed comments, or the 
previous message _again_.

And as for archives ... if the only message in the entire thread that 
was saved by the archive was "yours", well, bottom posting with full 
preservation might be the only thing between us and the collapse of 
civilization. Or possibly google might rescue us ... or perhaps it 
really wasn't that important.

-jim
"All mail clients suck. Including mutt."

On Aug 9, 2005, at 9:44 PM, Phillip Hutchings wrote:

> Because they're silly
>> You have to wonder, if top-posting is such a bad thing, why most mail 
>> clients default to putting the cursor at the top of the reply when 
>> replying to emails.
>
> The OSS ones are easy,  fix LookOut and I'll be impressed. Gmail as 
> well...
>> Perhaps if it bothers you enough, you post-order zealots should 
>> submit patches to evolution, thunderbird, mutt and probably emacs too 
>> to send the cursor to the bottom of the post when replying to mail.
>
> I've seen many more irritating things than top posting, but I tend to 
> get around it by trimming the emails. There's no excuse to quote the 
> whole thread, that's why I have an 8000 email archive from WellyLUG - 
> so I can scan back if I want.
>> I'm actually half-serious about this, since if it took more effort to 
>> top-post, I doubt hopelessy lazy a**holes like me would ever do it.
>
> --
> Phillip Hutchings
> phillip.hutchings at sitharus.com
>
>