Abandoning bottom-posting
jefftk.com
Abandoning bottom-posting
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Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#2The article misses the point that abandoning bottom -posting only works if you don't quote content from the message you're replying to. If you do, then by all means bottom-post.
The worst case is a long exchange with multiple participants, all quoted, some top-posters and some bottom-posters.
And finally, if you quote multiple passages and reply to them individually within a single post (as I often do), you simply must bottom-post or your message will be incomprehensible.
As far as I'm concerned, a top-poster is either a narcissist or very inexperienced in Internet communications. Or both.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#3Bottom posting is also good for people who might have missed a message in the thread. For example, I sometimes see messages incorrectly classified as spam, and it is really annoying to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of an email just to see what I missed.
It is also annoying to deal with people who never remove quotes they are not replying to. Bottom posting encourages the removal of quotes beyond a certain level; people who top post routinely ignore the quoted text.
I guess the point of the article is not that bottom posting should die, but that quoting messages at all should die. Remove quoted text or make it optional, and the bottom/top posting argument goes away entirely. If you assume everyone receives all messages anyway, what is the point of quoting?
(Edit: Personally, I would rather not give up quoting, because messages may be lost and I would like to see whatever context I missed. It is also nice to see the context of a reply; "That is a bad idea!" could refer to anything in a message, bottom posting helps to clear it up.)
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#4The article misses the point that abandoning bottom -posting only works if you don't quote content from the message you're replying to. If you do, then by all means bottom-post. The worst case is a long exchange with multiple participants, all quoted, some top-posters and some bottom-posters. And finally, if you quote multiple passages and reply to them individually within a single post (as I often do), you simply mu…
The battle was lost long ago. I've tried insisting on bottom-posting, with the result that people sometimes wouldn't even see the reply below the quoted text. Raging against top-posters doesn't pay the bills, unfortunately.
Edit: The only place bottom-posting still works is on technical mailing lists.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#5Bottom posting is also good for people who might have missed a message in the thread. For example, I sometimes see messages incorrectly classified as spam, and it is really annoying to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of an email just to see what I missed. It is also annoying to deal with people who never remove quotes they are not replying to. Bottom posting encourages the removal of quotes beyond a cer…
Well, if you don't quote, you can quickly lose context because everything is threaded on a subject line consisting entirely of "question" or "hi". Plus, top-posters are the ones most likely to not include In-Reply-To headers.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#6The article misses the point that abandoning bottom -posting only works if you don't quote content from the message you're replying to. If you do, then by all means bottom-post. The worst case is a long exchange with multiple participants, all quoted, some top-posters and some bottom-posters. And finally, if you quote multiple passages and reply to them individually within a single post (as I often do), you simply mu…
> As far as I'm concerned, a top-poster is either a narcissist or very inexperienced in Internet communications. Or both.
I bet you've not been exposed to many corporate email chains. Top-posting makes a lot of sense there. I often get copied on an email chains from which only the last part affects me. For example it will be a long discussion about some task and then I'll get copied because I'm the person who does X and need to help out. Bottom posting wouldn't work here for a number of reasons:
- I don't care about the project and its planning 20 emails ago - but I still may need some information from those emails. What I need is the task (at the very top) and context if required (at the bottom).
- If anyone tried to edit the history by removing unnecessary parts, they'd most likely remove the parts not important to them, but later on same questions would get repeated as soon as new people join the conversation.
- Leaving all needed parts and bottom posting / replying inline would result in 20+ levels of nesting and each inline section would become its own thread. This is just not possible to manage without some public archive with thread support.
Both styles have sense in different environments. I bottom-post to public mailing lists, because it makes more sense there. I top-post to other people at work where exchange==email, because it makes more sense there.
I used to bring up the same argument and the same quote about why top-posting is bad - but I guess I was wrong - I just didn't see the issue from the other side at that point. This makes me think that people top-posting in html on public mailing lists simply don't understand the other side either, but may adjust with time. As long as we don't assume either side is narcissistic and allow the possibility that we're not experienced in every possible scenario of Internet communication, we may just get along... Just try to adjust to the audience and environment sometimes. This may mean top-posting to some office; as well as fighting with your POS outlook to allow you to bottom-post to a mailing list in plaintext without any attachments.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#7I used to bottom-post until I noticed that I was the only person doing it over several years of communication, and that following the old convention now made _me_ look like the newbie who doesn't know how to use email.
Top-posting is efficient for single responses to single-issue threads because it brings the newest and most relevant message to the forefront. Context is not a problem for most messages because readers who have been following the discussion can get sufficient context from the sender and subject line. For the minority of messages where it is a problem, the parent post is right after the text. Context does become a bigger problem when there is a long thread with multiple users discussing multiple topics using the same subject line, as often used to happen on Usenet but which I have rarely seen in email.
I will still inline-post if replying to multiple issues in a long post like in old Usenet debates.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#8Bottom posting is also good for people who might have missed a message in the thread. For example, I sometimes see messages incorrectly classified as spam, and it is really annoying to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of an email just to see what I missed. It is also annoying to deal with people who never remove quotes they are not replying to. Bottom posting encourages the removal of quotes beyond a cer…
Well, if you don't quote, you can quickly lose context because everything is threaded on a subject line consisting entirely of "question" or "hi". Plus, top-posters are the ones most likely to not include In-Reply-To headers.
"Well, if you don't quote, you can quickly lose context because everything is threaded on a subject line consisting entirely of "question" or "hi"."
Agreed, see my edit; I would rather not see quoting go the way of the dodo. Unfortunately, top-posting discourages quoting entirely; the quoted text just piles up at the bottom of the message, easily turning into hundreds of kilobytes of text, until someone is kind enough to delete it (usually a bottom-posting sort of person).
"Plus, top-posters are the ones most likely to not include In-Reply-To headers."
Shouldn't that be done automatically by one's email client?
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#9Bottom posting is also good for people who might have missed a message in the thread. For example, I sometimes see messages incorrectly classified as spam, and it is really annoying to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of an email just to see what I missed. It is also annoying to deal with people who never remove quotes they are not replying to. Bottom posting encourages the removal of quotes beyond a cer…
Well, if you don't quote, you can quickly lose context because everything is threaded on a subject line consisting entirely of "question" or "hi". Plus, top-posters are the ones most likely to not include In-Reply-To headers.
Edit your quotes. We don't need to (re)read the whole thing.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if you don't quote, you can quickly lose context because everything is threaded on a subject line consisting entirely of "question" or "hi". Plus, top-posters are the ones most likely to not include In-Reply-To headers.
"Well, if you don't quote, you can quickly lose context because everything is threaded on a subject line consisting entirely of "question" or "hi"." Agreed, see my edit; I would rather not see quoting go the way of the dodo. Unfortunately, top-posting discourages quoting entirely; the quoted text just piles up at the bottom of the message, easily turning into hundreds of kilobytes of text, until someone is kind enoug…
Outlook at least used to be a big offender in not including those headers.