[plug] Top posting?

[Cameron Patrick]

Jeffrey Lim wrote:

| but back to the topic - ever wondered why people talk so much about
| trimming down stuff when _bottom_-posting - but no mention of trimming
| is ever made at all (generally speaking; at least not in this thread -
| correct me if i am wrong) when talking about _top_-posting?

I would imagine that this is because when bottom-posters don't snip,
you have to wade through pages of unnecessary quotes; when top-posters
don't snip, you just move onto the next message and ignore the quotes
below what they wrote.

When I open a message and see a screen-ful of quotes, I'm inclined to
ignore it.  (This is generally the example that top-posters use in
their defence.)  When I open a message and see one line of text that
makes no sense without context, followed by a screen-ful of quotes,
I'm also likely to ignore it.  Often mail arrives in a funny order so
I may not even have read the message that it is a reply to.
Top-posted messages which stand on their own, like Adam Davin's recent
post in this thread, are much less annoying.

Incidentally, there are two flavours of quoting that really quite
annoy me.  One is the "---Original Message---" type of top-posting
where there is no attribution line and no ">" marker before the quoted
text.  Another one is where you see bottom-posted messages where the
> quoted text that has been wrapped badly, so that the lines starting
with ">" markers
> are interleaved with lines which contain quoted text but no ">"s.
Since my
> mail client colour-codes quoted messages, both of these make it harder
to quickly
> see what was written by who.

Cameron.