[ubuntu-za] Top Posting and other sins

Morgan Collett morgan at ubuntu.com
Mon Mar 16 12:32:37 GMT 2009


On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 12:37, Robert Holm <robhholm at lantic.net> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I see that there is still quite a bit of Top Posting on the list and
> it occurred to me that perhaps the meaning of the term is not
> understood by everyone, so perhaps it would be in order to quote
> the following from the Ubuntu Mailing List Rules of Etiquette:
>
> Quote
>
> 1) "Why should I place my response *below* the quoted text?
> The usual reading flow is from top to bottom, and people expect
> a chronological sequence similar to this. That's the standard.
> This may sound like a weak argument, but people are not used
> to reading the other way around, especially people who are reading
> a lot of articles, (and would therefor qualify as the ideal people to
> answer
> your question). When reading your response they have no idea
> what you are referring to and they have to jump backwards and
> forwards to get a sense of what it's about.
> In short, reading the posting becomes more difficult and time wasting"
>
> "And besides: doesn't it look stupid to first get the answer and then
> see the question?
> (Aside from 'Jeopardy' of course)"
>
> 2) "Limit your signature to no more than 4 lines. Most of the
> useful stuff in signatures is already in the message headers
> anyway and anything else just wastes space in the archives."
>
> 3) "No HTML. This setting is configurable 'per email address'.
> This means creating an Ubuntu-za entry in your address book
> and setting the properties accordingly. Please take the trouble
> to do this."
>
> End of quote.
>
> I paraphrased the above slightly in the interests of keeping it
> short(er).
>
> If I am trespassing on the list administrator's territory here, I
> apologise.
> Feel free to chastise me.

No, thanks Robert, it's great for the list admins to not always have
to be the net police :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOFU is another explanation of top
posting and includes the following: "Microsoft has had a significant
influence on top-posting by the ubiquity of its software; its e-mail
and newsreader software places the cursor at the top by default, and
in several cases makes it difficult not to top-post..."

Unfortunately Gmail has top posting on by default, but you can fix
that with the Better Gmail firefox extension (or the associated
Greasemonkey script which it contains).

Regards
Morgan



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