About my health, top posting vs bottom posting, and Ubuntu forums

[Jonathan Marsden]

On 04/28/2012 05:19 AM, Jared Norris wrote:

> Top posting is discouraged in all Ubuntu mailing lists as it can make
> conversations very difficult to read. ...


So does failing to edit what you quote, so requiring readers to scroll
through tens or hundreds of lines of the original message, trying to
determine which part of it you are responding to.  Please only quote
enough to establish the context for your response.  It is very rare that
this principle leads to quoting all of the text in a lengthy message.

The article you pointed to, http://www.idallen.com/topposting.html ,
stresses in *bold* the need for:

>> trimming your original message down

yet you did not seem to do that.

If someone has a neurological disorder that actively prevents them from
quoting correctly, then I'd rather see their posts any way they can do
it, than not see them participate at all.  For the vast majority of us,
learning to follow a few simple and long established conventions that
make communication in email mailing lists efficient and effective is
possible, appropriate and expected.  These conventions include:

 * Use a meaningful subject line
 * Quote only what is needed to establish context for a response
 * Prefix all quoted material with a correct attribution line

Any decent email client (including Sylpheed, the default email client in
Lubuntu) will help with the mechanics of the attribution line, and with
adding "> " quote prefixes to each line of quoted material. Creating
good subject lines, and deciding exactly what small subset of a message
to quote above your response to it, are both things that need human
involvement.

I note in passing that these conventions have existed on the Internet
and Usenet since at least the mid 1980s, and so predate not just Ubuntu,
but Linux itself.

Let's all help one another to be productive email users, by following
these conventions to the best of our ability.

Jonathan