The reason that I raised this in the first place was to raise awareness of the problem.
The problem is this: Suppose you have a thread whose heading is simply [users][moderated] which is not that uncommon. A problem is posed then someone makes a statement like "Why don't you try such and such with another few lines of explanation". If the replies are inserted at the beginning of the message then people who are looking at the emails arriving in their inbox see a solution or a comment to a problem that it is not easy to see without scrolling down. This is not a problem if you're just talking to Aunt Maude because you presumably can remember what you are talking about. But on a list where you have several thousand people listening to the conversation nobody can remember who was talking about what. In that situation if people intersperse their replies with the original question, or put the reply after the original question, then other members of the list will firstly see the original question, then put it into context with the reply. It may well be that someone has a better solution to the original question never reads it because they don't see it, because all the top-posted replies have pushed the original question off the screen. the [users] [moderated] posts are especially problematic as there is nothing to distinguish them from any other with the same topic. So you might get a dozen emails with the same subject land in your inbox at once, with comments that seem to be totally cryptic and certainly unrelated to each other, and without going to the effort of scrolling down and unwinding the conversation you can't tell if the particular subject is of interest at all. In that case, most readers just don't bother. So, in a sense top posting becomes very counter-productive, especially on high volume lists such as this. On some less tolerant lists than this one, people who top post are given very terse reminders of what the rules are. In my opinion, it's not about arbitrary rules but rather about making the list work more effectively in answering people's questions. -- God bless you, Keith Bates 4 Mooloobar St Narrabri NSW 2390 Phone: 02 67924890 Fax: 02 67925418 www.new-life.org.au If you don't have a reason to live JESUS IS THE ANSWER! Ask him into your life today... He really does make a difference. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
