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

[Phillip Hutchings]

> 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.

I tend to intersperse comments if the comment relates to a particular  
paragraph. I can tell you that my current mail archive is 377MB on  
disk, and that's a lot of mail. Around three years worth. Anyway,  
Command-DownArrow gets me to the right place ;)

> 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.

Depends on the message, but we do have archives.

I guess the only thing worse than top posting and idiots who make up  
their own quoting style is when people insist on combining emails, or  
replying and changing the subject. That screws up my threading and I  
make sure everyone knows it.

That and US spelling :P

--
Phillip Hutchings
phillip.hutchings at sitharus.com


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 2234 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.wellylug.org.nz/pipermail/wellylug/attachments/20050809/7bd11e90/attachment.bin