The assumption behind this recommendation seems to be that all mail clients are the same and the list is read the same by everyone. I already *manually* truncate lines to match the line-width of the sender. I prefer text flow of paragraphing among those whose clients and list archives handle it properly. So I do not turn on hard line-chopping. I am doing it manually right now to be polite. I appreciate that people don't complain when I fail to do that here.
To tell me to not to top post from a client that doesn't have ">" marking turned on or even available just makes a mess. See how Ross's post appears to me and consider what would happen if I blithely commented in line. LibreOffice users have this flame war monthly. I get schooled by NoOp regularly. If it happens here, I am freakin' leavin'. Also, the fact that not everyone reads the archive the same way, but use NNTP synthesizers, such as GMane, just creates mystery meat for those of us who have no idea what those users are seeing (or producing). To then be schooled by them is unacceptable. Also, there has already been the discussion about thread preservation (even though people continue threads without changing topics so it is hardly a reliable process anyhow). [People who use NNTP readers see the threads in expando-views and have no need for the context, so they are infuriated by the repetition. There are clueless ones who think there is some sort of statutory requirement to keep full threads, even though this is an archived list and that is subject to all the discovery one would care to be exposed to.] "bad" may be "unpleasant for you" but how about looking at the interoperability challenges and not encouraging belief that there is a silver-bullet, one-size fits all fiat when the only thing that works is civility. [NOTE: This post has been filtered to incivility level -3. Your mileage may vary. No neutrinos were harmed in the making of this post. Good luck if your required line-width is narrower than this.] - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Ross Gardler [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, September 30, 2011 01:47 To: [email protected] Subject: Top posting is bad At the risk of starting a flame-war I am going to state that top-posting is bad on publicly archived mailing lists. Can we please stop doing it? It is very difficult to understand what is going on in a mailing list, especially the archives, if it is common practice to top-post rather than reply inline. The problem is that one has to go back to the beginning of a thread to get a grasp of the context of a discussion. Top posting assumes that everyone has read every word up until that post. Very often this is not the case. Very often people dip into a thread half way through. Either because they have been busy for a few hours whilst the discussion progressed or because they got to the message via an archive search. Replying inline with careful cutting of no longer relevant content (this is the hard part), retains context and allows people to understand the main gist of what is being said. If someone is looking for the answer to a question in the archives, this context will tell them if the answer provide is for the question they are asking (in fact inline posting makes most search engines more accurate too as a result of proximity matching). If the person is dipping in to an ongoing thread the context can tell them how far back they need to read in order to understand the current position. I realise that some people disagree with this and prefer top posting. However, in ASF projects it is generally accepted that top posting is bad. Other environments are good for top posting, but ASF projects are not. Ross -- Ross Gardler (@rgardler) Programme Leader (Open Development) OpenDirective http://opendirective.com
