Stop top posting, please.

[Charles Steinkuehler]

admin at kclinux.net wrote:
> Yes it (top posting) was true for the Usenet group back in the day.  That's
> when also we were running 486/Pent computers and a large hard drive was 2
> gigs?  Come on people, get real.

To me, the whole top-posting thing isn't about bandwidth or storage, but 
courtesy.  The 'top-poster' by definition has included some (or all) of 
a previous message, preceded by their own comments.

Since english reads top-down, this not only puts the text flow out of 
normal time sequence, but says to me that the poster:

a) didn't take the time to scroll down in their mail client (expecting 
me and *ALL* other viewers to do this for them)

b) expects me to spend my time linking the relevant prior information 
with the content of their post, usually without any snipping of previous 
content or other syntactical clues that would make this easier

c) simply hit "reply" and started typing, because that was the easiest 
thing to do (typically leaving a growing tail of signatures and 
mailing-list notices at the bottom).

d) all of the above :-)

This (and other mailing lists) are public forums.  Any messages you send 
to the list gets read by a *LOT* of people.  By posting to a list, you 
are asking a large number of people to listen to what you have to say. 
It is impolite to ask these people to stumble over your poorly formatted 
message in the process.

Bottom line:  When posting messages to a large group of people, you 
should do what you can to make it easy for them to read, conveying the 
impression (even if it's false) that you care about their time, not just 
your own.

Every message I see that is top-posted or simply quotes the entire 
previous message verbatim (or otherwise makes it harder for me to follow 
the ongoing discussion) strikes me as slightly rude.  Not as bad as 
spam, but I typically don't give these "inconsiderate" messages as much 
thought as well formatted, easy to read messages, so they're that much 
more likely to wind up in /dev/null.

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net