I've always top posted because it details the entire history of who said what and when to people that may be added to the discussion later or forwarded to another party as an FYI. They don't have previous context without the whole thread available.
Abandoning bottom-posting
21–30 of 58 posts
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#22Bottom 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…
> Bottom posting is also good for people who might have missed a message in the thread.
But it's worse for people who have been diligently following the email discussion the whole time. "Hey, could you repeat that first bit again and again and again? Yup!"
I also don't like to delete old context, because a late email could eventually get forwarded to a new party, in which case having the complete context is an advantage.
In summary: I assume the common case is that a few people with normal memories are reading the mail, and I can just cut to the chase by top-posting my reply. But I preserve the old stuff at the bottom for the rare but important case of new participants.
P.S. I realize that I'm bottom posting my reply.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#23Bottom-posting, due to its falling out of favor in the mainstream, has become a shibboleth that signifies a certain degree of competence with technology and Internet communication in general. While I'd certainly prefer it if everyone I corresponded with followed proper quoting etiquette, I have to say that it's also fairly convenient to glance at an email message and immediately be able to infer with reasonable confi…
> Bottom-posting, due to its falling out of favor in the mainstream, has become a shibboleth that signifies a certain degree of competence with technology and Internet communication in general.
Further, it could even be considered rude to start bottom posting in a chain of existing top-posting-only.
That said, I do prefer bottom posting when it makes sense, and practice it when it is convenient or the social norm of the community I am conversing within.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#24The 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.
> Edit: The only place bottom-posting still works is on technical mailing lists.
And Hacker News.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#25Bottom-posting, due to its falling out of favor in the mainstream, has become a shibboleth that signifies a certain degree of competence with technology and Internet communication in general. While I'd certainly prefer it if everyone I corresponded with followed proper quoting etiquette, I have to say that it's also fairly convenient to glance at an email message and immediately be able to infer with reasonable confi…
> it's also fairly convenient to glance at an email message and immediately be able to infer with reasonable confidence what level of expertise to expect from the stranger on the other end
You are confusing "level of expertise" with "number of years on the Internet".
Knowing the Internet seniority of the person you are responding to is an unremarkable data point in all but arcane conversations about the Internet itself (and even then, it's still of dubious value).
I used to be on your side (old Usenet dog here) but these days, I am convinced that top posting is actually a more productive way of communicating for a bunch of reasons:
- Most of the time, you know the context of the conversation so reading the new content at the top of the message saves you time.
- Most old Internet dogs suck at quoting either because they've never learned how to summarize or because they are cutting out the parts of the message they don't want you to see (either intentionally or accidentally). Some will cut too much text, other will quote twenty lines to add one, but either way, you end up visually hunting the new content interleaved with several levels of previous quoting, which is tiresome and entirely avoided by top posting.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#26The 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…
There's another reason bottom- (or interspersed) posting does not work well in corporate email chains: Outlook flatly doesn't support it. Quoted text in a reply is not indented by default. The replier has to do extra work to put their reply in a different font or color so it's clear what's quoted text and what's new text.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#27Bottom-posting, due to its falling out of favor in the mainstream, has become a shibboleth that signifies a certain degree of competence with technology and Internet communication in general. While I'd certainly prefer it if everyone I corresponded with followed proper quoting etiquette, I have to say that it's also fairly convenient to glance at an email message and immediately be able to infer with reasonable confi…
Seriously?
I have come to associate this particular style as meaning the emailer/poster is going to be an unhelpful, holier than thou, pedantic ass-hole.
It's a shibboleth without doubt, but not for the clique you think.
> I was walking down the street
Better known as a sidewalk
> when I had a revelation
Oh what pray tell?
>that not many people actually use NoSQL
There's a distinction between idiots and people you fail to comprehend.
> And so I no longer worried that I used relational databases
What the poster here fails to understand because of his miniscule brain is that NoSQL is so fundamentally superior to relational databases that only an idiot would use any other thing. It's not even worth saying. Though I took the trouble just now to enlighten this poorly educated OP who obviously shouldn't ever touch a computer again.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#28Earlier 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"." 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.
Blackberry too, and I suspect a few webmail clients.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#29If top posting is so awesome, why aren't the comments on his blog above the text?
Because a blog post is different from an email discussion.
Re: Abandoning bottom-posting
#30Bottom 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…
> Bottom posting is also good for people who might have missed a message in the thread. But it's worse for people who have been diligently following the email discussion the whole time. "Hey, could you repeat that first bit again and again and again? Yup!" I also don't like to delete old context, because a late email could eventually get forwarded to a new party, in which case having the complete context is an advant…
I also don't like to delete old context, because a late email could eventually get forwarded to a new party, in which case having the complete context is an advantage.
A proper mail client will be fully capable of forwarding the full thread (or any relevant portion) to another user. Whose proper email client will be capable of interpreting the attachment as threaded email and displaying it properly.