[LAU] Top Posting [Was: Linux compatible keybord controller?]

Rob lau at kudla.org
Thu Jan 2 17:25:19 UTC 2014


On 01/02/2014 10:45 AM, Q wrote:
> My point was, there is nothing inherently polite/rude about either posting
> style. However, bottom-posting IS very inconvenient to read.

Only when the person doing it is too ignorant or lazy to trim, which in my
professional experience is a good predictor of their inability or
unwillingness to read, as well.

> If trimming is
> so important and bottom-posting breaks without it, why quote ANYTHING at all.

Really? You really don't see a difference between contextual quoting like
this and not quoting anything at all? To me, this makes all the difference
between following a conversation and wondering what exactly someone is
replying to.

On the other hand, I would personally prefer no quotes at all over
top-posting, simply because if I wanted to see the entire message someone
was replying to, with no easy-to-scan contextual indicators like these, I
would have brought up the original message. But what we have here is a
conversation. What we have in a top-posting thread is people saying stuff
with little to no consideration of what's been said before. Top-posters
also have a tendency to say insightful things like "lol", "me too",
"unsubscribe" and "please remove me from this list", though that's a
problem with them, not the UI paradigm itself.

Straw poll: which message makes it easier to follow the thread, Q's with no
quoting at all or this one with contextual trimmed quotes?

> After all, what's quoted in bottom-posting is incomplete chunks and no
> longer a full record of all that's gone before

If you want a full record, don't delete emails. Simple as that. My mail
archive dating back to 1996, business and personal, still fits several
times over on media that's smaller than my pinky fingernail, and switching
between messages in a thread is one keystroke while paging down through
many layers of untrimmed top-posts often requires many.

Rob



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