Hi :) Top posting and leaving the thread intact allows a person that is new to the thread or can't quite remember context, to gain the full context of the later replies. It also allows people to only read the last message without having to scroll or wade through tons of stuff from previous messages or try to pick out other emails that have the same subject-line in order to try to make sense of this one. It neatly achieves both choices without requiring the receiver to do anything other than scroll or not even scroll if they already remember roughly what the thread is about. If someone reads the latest message and then suddenly realises that they don't seem to know the context after all then they can choose to quickly scroll down and hopefully spot a message that does remind them. It's the way that almost all emailing works in almost every office, it's the way phones and hand-helds are set-up, it's the way many people on the accessibility list prefer as they can simply stop the screen-reader once they have got the gist of the reply.
There was a beautiful example earlier where i replied to the message as it was written but then got accused of being off-topic because the alleged topic had been edited out. Note that the criticism was on-list just to make sure that anyone new to the list becomes very aware that they are likely to be publicly humiliated if they do something slightly wrong. Imagine queuing to buy something in a shop and the person at the counter punches the customer in front of you. Would you continue to wait in line or leave and perhaps use a different store? Note also that top-posters on this list have never asked bottom-posters to post at the top. It has always been bottom-posters arrogantly demanding that people conform to their own obtuse way of doing things. I did try bottom-posting a few times and instead of people saying thanks they just further abused me, again only publicly, that i hadn't done something quite right. If there had been anything approaching politeness or a gentle nudge in the right direction then i might have tried again but i have no interest in allowing bullies to intimidate me or anyone else. 'Regards' from Tom :) --- On Wed, 22/2/12, Mirosław Zalewski <[email protected]> wrote: From: Mirosław Zalewski <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Top posting To: [email protected] Date: Wednesday, 22 February, 2012, 19:41 On 22/02/2012 at 20:19, Tom Davies <[email protected]> wrote: > Most people and especially those that are new to the lists will > top-post because that is what they are most familiar with. Perhaps you have encountered that somewhere: A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is it such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? In my entire life I have never seen any mailing list or Usenet group with so much top-posting and unneeded quotes as this one. Since this is user support group, it should be just ignored in most cases (we want to help user, not bully them). But I think that people who often write to group should adapt to basic mailing etiquette. It isn't that hard, really. -- Best regards Mirosław Zalewski -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
