Note on TRIMMING, was: Why do people detest top posting so much?

[M. Fioretti]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 10:56:00 AM -0500, Pete Clapham wrote:

> May I humbly point out that if you're actually following the
> conversation, you've read the previous messages.  Bottom posting
> forces you to go through all that again until you find the answer
> you're interested in.

that's true ONLY if the person who bottom posted did not trim as much
as possible before adding new text. The worst possible thing is to not
trim as much as possible before replying. People who don't trim
mailing list messages:

greatly increase, for no reason whatever but lazyness or carelessness,
overall network traffic, load on the mailing list server and size of
the mailing list archives.

make those same archives much less useful, since they return lots of
almost identical hits whatever you were searching

(the worst part) those people make *others* pay for their own habits.
Everybody with a metered internet connection (be it dial-up or wi-fi,
cellular GPRS/UMTS/etc...) has to download (=pay!) many times text he
or she had already read...

> Top posting makes it easier to continue a conversation.

1) not at all, if you're reading the message in the archives, to find
   the solution to some problem. Posting in a way that makes everybody
   in the future read bottom-up ten screenfuls of text to fix
   something isn't the best possible service.

2) even ignoring archives, that assertion is true only if all members
   of a conversation have very fresh in their mind who the heck the
   top poster is, and what the heck he's talking about. Private or
   in-office email conversations are a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
   beast. Nobody else takes part in those, so nobody cares how you
   manage them. But many people follow many mailing lists at the same
   time and at random intervals. So they're simply going to ignore any
   message which takes more than half a second to figure out what it's
   about (as it surely happens with top posting). When you reply to a
   mailing list, always start with the assumption that nobody else
   remembers what you were writing about, or where the conversation
   had stopped 3 days before. Try to save as much of their time as
   possible, and you'll be much more likely to get answer.

In any case, and here is the real/only point of this message, if you
trim as much as possible before even starting to reply... very often,
at that point it simply won't matter anymore whether you top or bottom
post.

	Marco Fioretti
	http://mfioretti.net
-- 
Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84