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Top posting in emails

Ariadne

07:57 / 23.02.06

I'm interested in what people think about this. I'm on a Yahoo-based cycling mailing list and someone has just been moaning about people top posting - ie. posting their response at the top of their email instead of interspersing it with the previous person's comments.

But personally I much prefer top posting to trying to work out who said what, and when. I find it irritating when people add their own responses in amongst what the person before said - it's a very IT/ geeky thing to do and I reckon it makes it harder to follow. I think in an email literate age, people know that the latest response is at the top, and they can scroll down to see what came before if they want to. It's especially annoying in a mailing list situation where you've been following the discussion anyway - I KNOW what A said, and I just want to read B's answer, not plough through the mush of A and B.

Thoughts?

Jub

08:14 / 23.02.06

Top posting all the way. It seems a bit hand-holdy to intersperse comments - and fair enough if it's a really technical document and you need to address each point carefully, but usually I reckon you can make your points saliently enough by adding your replies in one go and all together (just like the barb!!)

Mourne Kransky

08:28 / 23.02.06

Also in total agreement. Perhaps you could do my thinking for me for a while, Ariadne? You're a sensible sort and trustworthy, and I need a rest. I have the bird flu, you know.

Sniv

08:43 / 23.02.06

Agreed, I never see the problem with top-posting, it makes it easier to read. It's usually old-school net users that insist on this (I've found), especially in newsgroups. It's very pointless, and makes following the discussion harder, although it is easier to jump in halfway through.

If you simply must read the conversation from the start every time, be sensible and start from the bottom, don't enforce your crazy bottom posting dogma on the rest of the net!

■

08:53 / 23.02.06

Top is generally fine, but I do occasionally do the interspersed thing when replying to a long mail with lots of points.

Ariadne

09:03 / 23.02.06

Geek

Ariadne

09:15 / 23.02.06

Sorry, cube, that was uncalled for! I do see the point of it - I was kind of taken with the idea when I first saw it but generally I think it makes things hard to follow. Especially when you get all the wee >>s in the message.

Saveloy

10:29 / 23.02.06

In personal emails between myself and another I go for top posting.

On email lists I go for this: (comments starting with '>' = previous poster)

----------------------------------------------

> blah blah blah blah blah, blah
> blah blah balhasaslk lask lkask k

Diddly diddly diddly!

> jsdjsdj sjdk ssk, sdjsd js!

Ning nang, noo nong.

-------------------------------------------------

Reasons:

1. I find it easier to follow in a long and complicated post.

2. It means I can edit out all the irrelevant stuff. This makes reading of digests much more comfortable for all concerned. I'm not a fascist about it, but I do get annoyed at having to scroll down through line after line of the same crap a dozen times.

pointless & uncalled for

11:22 / 23.02.06

My rule is that I'll top post if you can see your message and all messages that you are answering in the same window without confusion.

If I can't do that then I'll copy and paste the points I'm responding to into my response, naming names if necessary. I'll leave the messages intact below in order that they can be appreciated in context.

I find that interspersing your comments into someone elses can be problematic. Either you retain all text, in which case you might appear to be responding to parts of a message that you aren't, or you remove text which can have the appearance of using straw man tactics.

Bear in mind that e-mail is supposed to be quick and unlike a letter, from where I understand the ettiquette comes, the original message is very easily retained as opposed to very easily lost.

Squirmelia

11:28 / 23.02.06

I'm still stuck in the ways of Fidonet, when it was common to quote some of the lines of what the previous person had said to provide context, along with their initials to make it easier to follow. Top posting would waste bandwidth and that was rather important back then.

I no longer use Fidonet and am not really concerned about wasting bandwidth now, but top posting annoys me in mailing list digests and in email threads between a number of people, because I find it difficult to follow and do not want to have to read the same thing many times over. I had assumed that people were just lazy as opposed to actually finding top posting easier to follow!

grant

18:27 / 23.02.06

I'm with Squirmelia on this one.

■

20:27 / 23.02.06

Sorry, cube, that was uncalled for!

Not at all, I take it as a compliment. I learned to use email mainly on listserv boards using PINE (as your grandparents) as a client, in which top posting generally made no sense at all. You weren't replying to one person you were replying to dozens so you had to keep it clear.
I still used a (mainly) text-only email client and what I hate more than anything else is the presumption that you might want to look at embedded pretty pictures and HTML code rather than communicating with text. Ugh. For example, you should see the hellish mess that the Bookseller daily bulletin is each day - about 80 lines of sloppy code and ads with about 10 lines of information.
Ick. I have no problem parsing embedded >>>>s, though.

Saltation

22:41 / 23.02.06

> You weren't replying to one person you were replying to dozens so you had to keep it clear.

quite

>I'm with Squirmelia on this one.

"Me too"

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:35 / 24.02.06

It's context for me. If it's a conversation or debate I tend to intersperse my responses at the relevent part of the email. If it's not such a situation I delete the text of the email I'm replying to. I don't understand top-posting. It's laziness to me. If someone phones you do you reply to what they say then say "previously you said" and quote their entire conversation back at them?

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