On the other hand, if you have been following the discussion, a rule requiring top posting can be greatly beneficial, especially when combined with a rule that you cannot go 'ding ding ding' and respond to each line of a prior message, as if this were a code review, but instead have to summarise, and more importantly, only address the main points. New people to the discussion will, of course suffer, but people who have been following the discussion will immediately know when they can go on to the next message, and not read reams of gorp they already know and have already seen 5 times looking to see if there is 'anything new' there. It saves a _ton_ of time. The pygame list is probably not the place for it, but I suspect many of you are also members of other, more closed lists, where the same usual suspects gather and argue a lot. You might try these rules and see whether it helps. For some of the lists I run it has meant that busy people stay subscribed, rather than leave when the number of list messages get large.
Just giving you a taste of it here, no more comments below: :-) Laura In a message of Sun, 02 Mar 2008 09:22:10 EST, Joe Johnston writes: >Luke Paireepinart wrote: >> So you read "lane fire" instead of "fire lane". >> > >Ah! Another bit of old school mailing list/usenet etiquette. And >yes, there is a Wikipedia entry about this: > >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Bottom-posting > >Top posting, also known as "jeopardy posting," has the unfortunate >consequence of giving the answer before the question is known. If you >haven't been following each response, then top-posting is quite confusing >. > >I think top-posting is useful in those places where the correspondants >stubbornly refuse to edit *any* of the previous responses, so you end >up with huge swathes of wasted text. At work, I see this style all the >time and it sets my teeth on edge. > >I suppose either method of quoting will work as long as we're >consistent. Being an "older, distinquished gentleman," I prefer mail >threads to begin with the oldest part of the message first and the >newest part. I'm already confused enough. :-) > >--Joe