Stop top posting, please.
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net
Fri May 23 16:43:14 CDT 2003
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
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