On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 11:52:54 -0500, Christofer C. Bell wrote: > On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Ron Johnson wrote: > > On 2009-03-22 11:45, Chris Bannister wrote: > >> > >> Bottom posting of course is just as bad or worse than top posting. > > > > The only person who can say that with a straight face is one who has spent > > too much time using Windows. > > > > 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 thing in e-mail? > > This isn't true. Come enter the 21st Century, it started nearly a decade > ago. ;-) Top posting works well in a modern threaded mail reader (all of > which, incidentally, support HTML email). Because *you* are a curmudgeon > doesn't mean everyone else has to be. ;-) > > Your example looks like this in a threaded mail reader: > > Mail 1: Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? > Mail 2: A: Top-posting. > Mail 3: Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? > Mail 4: A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read > text.
Your argument assumes that all subscribers keep the older mails, or that they remember the previous discussion. I don't think that this a valid assumption for a high-volume mailing list with almost 3000 subscribers and 80-100 messages posted on an average day. > It looks no different than a discussion forum or other normal conversation. > In fact, reading bottom-posted threads in a *modern mail reader* is > annoying as it forces the reader to display a bunch of extraneous > unnecessary text (the quoted material). Maybe you should switch to a MUA that has a command to collapse quoted text. > I just read it in the previous > post, I don't need to see it again. I need to see the relevant context quoted (properly trimmed as the discussion progresses, of course), especially if a thread has run for a while. I simply do not have the time to search through the archive for the background information that I would need to join an ongoing discussion. > I bottom-post out of force of habit, however, it's archaic and generally > unnecessary. For the reason outlined above, I think that replying inline with prudent trimming of the older content is important on mailing lists like debian-user. If you make it difficult for other people to follow the discussion then you reduce your chances of getting good answers. -- Regards, | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer Florian | -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org