Re: top posting

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 6:59 PM, David Guntner <david@guntner.com> wrote:

Brad Alexander grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
> I'm just curious why so many people get so upset about top posting. To my
> mind, as threads get longer, those keeping up with the thread would not
> want to scroll through messages that they have already read. I know that I
> don't. If they are commenting inline, that is fine, but I think that
> scrolling to the bottom of each and every message is more of a pain than if
> a respondent posts at the top of the message.

https://wiki.debian.org/FAQsFromDebianUser#What_is_top-posting_.28and_why_shouldn.27t_I_do_it.29.3F

People shouldn't be bottom posting the way you describe, either.
Long-standing (literally decades-old) conventions for E-Mail have used
the quote-and-reply style for maintaining the flow of a conversation.
This is especially important on a mailing list, where many people can
contribute to a given conversation.

Actually, I can see the point of posting inline, however, leave it to google and other mail apps to go and ruin it. In the gmail web interface, when you reply to an email or even a thread, you get the text entry box, with the message you are responding to hidden by a "..." icon. Thus, if you are not paying attention or are trying to respond quickly, it is easily overlooked. I posted in a thread earlier, and was surprised when someone started their response with "don't top post." I didn't even realize I had, thanks again to google.

It's also a part of that long-standing convention that as a conversation
grows larger, you're also supposed to trim out the parts of the text
which no longer pertain to what you're replying to (keeping in enough
for relevance while getting rid of stuff that is no longer part of the
discussion). That is also, sadly, something that a lot of people don't
get. But it's not as disruptive to the conversation as suddenly
throwing comments on top of an existing conversation flow instead of
interspersed with the rest of them.

Top posting is even more disruptive when it's thrown in at the top of an
existing conversation where people have been quoting and adding their
comments among the quoted text. It's just plain lazy and is
disrespectful of the other people in the conversation.

All right, I can understand and respect that.

Given that this topic really isn't specific to Debian, it's probably
best if you take the conversation regarding it to the off-topic list:

http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic

--Dave