[ale] OT: top-posting

George L. Allen glallen01 at gmail.com
Wed Jan 7 11:52:23 EST 2009


On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 11:21:33AM -0500, Derrick Norris wrote:
> The best posting method IMO especially when several people are 
> contributing to a discussion is to embed comments into appropriate spots 
> in the previous posts.  And of course the worst is when you have a mix 
> of top-posters and bottom-posters.

I think bottom-posting is best when you're replying to specifics within a
message. As Derrick mentioned above - as described by
http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html --- "In addition to bottom-posting,
it is customary to leave out non-relevant parts of the message with regard
to the reply, and to put the reply directly beneath the quoted relevant
parts."

As I remember, this was the common usage on newsgroups - not to include the
entire previous message and 'bottom post,' but rather to bottom post to
specific parts, or to 'in-line' post. Then again, newsgroups all nearly
always read with a reader that knows how to thread messages sanely.

Outlook won't thread worth a flip - I much prefer mutt.

Anyway - I think most people now days just hit Reply and type, leaving the
old message in its entirety rather than summarizing. This may be a result
of mail-threading being broken on non *nix clients - or usage patterns
developed by Outlook. Either way - when in Outlook - top posting is fine -
so I don't have to scroll.

When in mutt - either is fine - except if 'bottom-posting' I'd prefer the
previous message is cut-down to quotes or summarized so I don't have to
scroll through 5 pages of text that I already saw in the last message to
hunt for a reply.

Bottom posting is probably better for discussion - newsgroups or usenet, while
topposting is quick-and-lazy for two-way conversation.



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