Here we go again. There is top-posting, which is, in general, a good thing, and is preferred by most email users, including the technically inclined, like myself. Its primary advantage is that it is a great courtesy to the readers of email threads, who can quickly assess a contribution to the thread for relevance to them. A secondary advantage for the poster is that it increases the likelihood that the new material will actually be read, or at least skimmed.
There is in-line posting, which is necessary when you need to reply to specific points in a previous post. You can put your comments into the immediate context to which they apply. This is also a good thing, if the circumstances require it. Then there is bottom-posting. It's a kind of virus that contaminates, primarily, open-source mailing lists. When a poster is infected he (yes, overwhelmingly, he) is overcome with the urge to tell people what to do. He is filled with a (completely spurious) sense of righteousness. He is a rebel, he is liberated, he carries the banner of freedom (free as in speech) against the grinding capitalist forces of oppression and regimentation. Therefore, you MUST DO AS YOU ARE TOLD. And so the champions of freedom become tuppenny Trotskys, low-rent Lenins, and we can say a quiet prayer of thanks that their influence extends no farther than the occasional mailing-list. How do I know? I've been there. I am now afflicted by a complementary virus. I am equally righteous and insufferable. I know, I know. But my desire is to see all of this nonsense fade away into an easy-going environment of live and let live. Bakunin before Lenin, and classical small-l liberalism before either. Peter West And he said to them, "Do you not yet understand?" On 23 Feb 2014, at 7:41 am, Tanstaafl <tansta...@libertytrek.org> wrote: > On 2014-02-22 4:28 PM, Johnny Rosenberg <gurus.knu...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I'm subscribed to a few groups myself, maybe I confused this one with the >> Apache OpenOffice one, but most of them seems to prefer everything but top >> posting. Personally I prefer this way, I'm not sure what to call it, but >> I'm doing it right now… > > It is called bottom or in-line posting, and is preferred by the more > technically inclined. > > It is primarily Outlook users who prefer blind top-posting (ie, quoting the > entire message they are replying to and adding their comment at the top). > > Most people who are rabidly anti bottom/inline posting will go out of their > way to complain about how bad bottom posting is, and will invariably use > BLIND bottom posting - quoting the ENTIRE message ABOVE your comment, which > is admittedly way WORSE than blind top-posting - as examples of why > bottom/inline posting is bad. They almost always simply refuse to even > acknowledge the difference between BLIND bottom posting, and inline posting > (quoting only the relevant portion, and putting your responses/comments AFTER > the relevant quoted text, which is much cleaner and easier to read than even > top-posting, mainly because you can clearly see the full context). -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org 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
