On Sat, 2003-05-31 at 19:42, Andrew Jorgensen wrote: > I just had another thought about the whole top-posting business. All of > your favorite news sites top-post. Okay, so the comments are > bottom-posted, but the first news item you see is the most recent one. I > prefer it that way.
Your analogy doesn't fit. News articles aren't threaded discussions. I agree that new threads should be at the top, but within the thread it is most useful when the discussion is chronological (oldest to newest). It's all about context and signal to noise. The biggest problem with top posting is it encourages people to simply include the entire previous message, sig and all. Because some top posters also inline comments, I have to scroll through the whole thing. (Higher noise.) The only thing worse than top posting is bottom posting a "me too" in a long thread that never had any content snipped out. (All noise.) Many online sites handle this by simply not providing a way to quote another message easily. -- Stuart Jansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED], AIM:StuartMJansen> When in doubt, use brute force. -- Ken Thompson, co-creator of Unix
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