On Sat, Sep 15, 2007 at 07:12:59PM +0100, Arthur Dent wrote: > 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!
There is also the issue of setting the line wrap in your editor to some _sane_ value (72 is a good value) -- Chris. ======
