style of emailing in the list (was: hdb: cdrom_pc_intr)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday, 22 September 2005 at 20:29:49 +0200, R.L. Reingard wrote:
> In-Reply-To: <575131af0509220824582c6d9b at mail.gmail.com>

This message is a reply to a technical thread.  I see that you use a
web browser for mail, but people who use MUAs will have had this
message and the thread that follows appended to the technical thread.
Other mailing lists (see below for one example) explicitly request
that you start a new thread if you're, well, starting a new thread.

> we had a topic some month ago, which was dealing with the fact, that
> it is faster to follow up with a topic, if you write answers (at
> least as much as possible) on the top of your reply. in this way our
> eyes can catch the answer (or new subject) first, and if necessary
> we see for more information by scrolling down the email text (which
> also shuold be snipped to a helpful length).

This may be faster for the sender, but is that the issue?  Anybody who
wants to understand the issue needs then to piece together the shreds
below.  It's *really* *painful*.

Apart from the excellent Wikipedia article referenced elsewhere
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting), you might like to take a
look at http://www.lemis.com/questions.html, which addresses not only
this issue on a similar mailing list (for FreeBSD), and
http://www.lemis.com/grog/reverse-horror.html.

Greg
--
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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