There isn't a list policy about top-posting vs. traditional reply format.
For those who don't know what is going on, the early days of mailing lists and Usenet had a conventional format for quoting and replying in which only the parts of the letter that are relevant to the reply get quoted, those parts get quoted before the reply, and quotes and replies are interspersed. When the Net started becoming mainstream (September, 1993 -- the September that never ended), a lot of the newcomers happened to use a different quote-and-reply format, which is now called top-posting. That's where you write your letter and then append a copy of the letter to which you are replying. Proponents of the traditional format are sometimes impassioned about the idea that top-posting is bad for conversation and that it reflects badly on the poster's culture and education. Personally I'm not too persuaded one way or the other about the technical merits of one format or the other -- I've seen good writing and bad writing in both -- but I suspect that some of the passion stems from a longing to return to the good old days, when the Internet was new and when cyberspace was suddenly revealed to be a paradise of upper-class (that is: in university), geeky, idealistic hackers just like you -- when suddenly you went from being alone in the world to having a vast, secret alternate reality full of friends or potential friends. Those were the glory days, and some of us (me) have never been quite able to choke down the fact that the Internet quickly filled up with the same stupid people who already populated Real Life. They quickly colonized it, overrunning the magical island paradise and turning it into a strip mall awash in spam and the same damn social pressures of conformity and blandness that we were trying to escape from in the first place. They were able to use the Net to organize their PTO meetings and watch T.V. News and jabber to each other about whatever topics they liked, even though they didn't know the first thing about how it worked, had never read Brunner or Vinge, and were in the habit of top-posting. Anyway, on the topic of top-posting vs. inline-quote-and-reply, I would like to point out that an even older tradition of writing involves composing long letters, broken into paragraphs, and reminding the reader of context with your own words rather than by quoting. This is how it was done with pen and paper or typewriter, and perhaps it helps you to write better if you have to choose your own structure and have to indicate the context explicitly in your own words. So, in my official capacity as list moderator with the god-like power to ban your e-mail address from posting to the list, I hereby make the following request: Try to write well. Thanks! Regards, Zooko --- Tahoe, the Least-Authority Filesystem -- http://allmydata.org store your data: $10/month -- http://allmydata.com/?tracking=zsig I am available for work -- http://zooko.com/résumé.html _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
