There have been any number of admonishments posted in this forum to
"not top post" because people "don't like reading the answers before
they know what the question is"
Of course, if one follows a thread from it's beginning, one *does*
know the question, and it is therefore more useful to have the newest
information and developments right at the top where they will be
visible first, without having to wade through repetitions of the same
damn block of text.
I've also seen tellingly pithy commentary that pure bottom posting is
just as annoying, especially if the lead-in is extremely long.
So, then, one is given advice to edit the quoted portion, and
interleave one's answers.
Interweaving is a lot of work, because the line breaks never match up
properly, so one is always adding or removing ">" characters, slowing
down what can already be a slow process.
Also, of course, sometimes one *needs* the whole text to remain in a
single bloc, to understand and/or frame the question properly. Or,
especially when arguments get a bit heated (guilty as charged), one
needs to quote exactly, as demonstration of one's honest intent --
because while editing does conserve bandwidth, it can be selective in
a bad way, too.
Of course, to be *certain* that what has gone before has not been
edited to alter meaning, one has to read the previous entries in the
thread, anyway! Who, me, paranoid? How long have *you* been on the
internet, friend?
I've seen forums where the hard-and-fast rule is "find an existing
thread on your topic before starting a new one", and others where
so-called-'necroposting' (resurrecting dead threads) is a 7-day-ban(!)
on the FIRST offense.
So what this all amounts to, is that *anything* one does, top-,
bottom-, or interweave-posting, snipping or not-snipping, is WRONG.
Or RIGHT, depending on the situation. o_O Clear as mud, right?
If you, Dear Reader, can't understand a posting simply because of the
ordering of the paragraphs, the problem resides in the READER, not the
POSTER -- and adjusting one's own habits is an easier fix than
changing the whole world.
And I personally would encourage posters to do so in whatever style is
sensible and comfortable to them -- as long as it's grammatical and
spelled correctly at least 90% of the time ;) That's all I ask.
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