I top post and don't interweave (post inline) or bottom post for the same reason. I use email instead of the yahoogroups site. It is an option in the Yahoogroups to have daily or individual emails sent. This is handy for many people.
So why is it so difficult to post inline or bottom post in email? Yahoo sticks all sorts of html code which is stripped out automatically if you top post, but if you interrupt the html by bottom posting or posting inline you create many problems with yourself and those would read your text in html such as on a browser which is almost everybody. The solution to this is to top post so that you don't mess up all of the coding hidden in the html, use text mode only (or cutting and pasting into an intermediary text file which is asking abit muc) or to be scrupulous about either manually deleting all text and added html or leaving it s it is to see what happens which isn't likely to be pretty or readable. There are advantages to top posting as most recent which is most important is last. You are forced to keep up with threads instead of jumping in midthread. You really only need to go down one or two steps if you need a reminder of previous discussions. However if you are a bottom poster then we always need to scroll to the bottom which is clearly more work. If you post inline which logically makes lots of sense it means that we are force to re-read what we have read before everytime. Clearly a waste of time, too. I am not sure what the best solution is. Top posting irritates those who use the yagoogroups site but is the best solution for those who use email. Inline posting is a compromise and has as many problems as it does solutions. Like all compromises it is less than ideal, but it is something that many people can live with. Just know that if you decide in terms of bottom posting that it will lead to lots of unreadable text and you will be thankful that these people top posted one. At least you could understand them without lots of incomplete html or html codes cropping up in ways not intended. I tried bottom posting and it does not work very well when you use email. I use yahoo email in Firefox. It makes it more difficult to post than it should be. I have also used the yahoogroups site, but find that this takes more discipline than I have as I must logon to my email then leave it and logon to each yahoogroup separately which is a waste of time that yahoo figured out when they set it up for having groups comments emailed daily or individually. I don't want to be too much of a rebel, but is this really such a big issue that we need to be continuously spinning our wheels on it? Roy ----- Original Message ---- From: Gary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2008 4:03:32 PM Subject: [LINUX_Newbies] OT: What *is* proper posting? 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-'necropos ting' (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. __________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Canada Toolbar: Search from anywhere on the web, and bookmark your favourite sites. Download it now at http://ca.toolbar.yahoo.com. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from this list, please email [EMAIL PROTECTED] & you will be removed.Yahoo! 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