I must admit I live in perpetual fear of forgetting to switch of html or rtf formatting (useful for work) and top posting. I can understand the issue with the former but can see absolutely no reason why top posting is such a problem. In fact I'd far prefer it. I get to my e-mail in batches and bottom posting means I've got to wade through stuff I've just read. I totally agree with snipping extensively. So that I can understand the almost religious fervour on this point could someone please explain to me why top posting is so hated!! I can understand that if you are responding to multiple points in an e-mail then you should reply below each point snipping out what is irrelevant to your reply in the original e-mail. If you're responding to an entire e-mail then the proper approach to my mind would to do as you would in business letters and start with a short paragraph explaining what you're doing (e.g. "In response to Fred's e-mail about AMD MP motherboards and interrupts, ...". I guess most of us are too lazy to do this so we just leave the original text in the e-mail. If we're really lazy we don't snip the irrelevant stuff out. Am I missing something totally?! I'm just about to go and get my flak jacket and helmet in anticipation of the responses. :) Regards, George
George Gardiner <asterisk@georgej.demon.co.uk> writes:> So that I can understand the almost religious fervour on this point > could someone please explain to me why top posting is so hated!!Because there's such an enormous amount of communication one would like to take part in, and not enough time. The easier it is to quickly discover a) whether each item is interesting, and b) what is the exact context of the item, and of its constituent parts, the more interesting material we can actually read. Therefore, "top posting" and "bottom posting" are equally bad; the ideal is an easily readable text that's placed into its proper context by short quotes of the relevant bits of previous communication. (Note: *short* quotes. If the reader wants the full text of the previous message, retrieving that message takes but a moment, so there's no need to quote it all.) For my own part, I have taken to ignoring anything that is badly formatted, top posted, bottom posted, or otherwise makes it difficult to quickly get into the flow of the communication. My default is to move on; only if your posting quickly establishes that it is, in fact, interesting to me, will I read it. To put it bluntly: if you can't be bothered to make an effort to communicate, what you say can't be very important. ;-) -tih -- Tom Ivar Helbekkmo, Senior System Administrator, EUnet Norway Hosting www.eunet.no T +47-22092958 M +47-93013940 F +47-22092901 FWD 484145
From: Tom Ivar Helbekkmo [mailto:tih@eunetnorge.no]
Sent: 11 November 2004 09:38
"My default is to move on; only if your posting quickly establishes that
it is, in fact, interesting to me, will I read it. To put it bluntly:
if you can't be bothered to make an effort to communicate, what you say
can't be very important."
------------------------------------------
I certainly agree with your sentiments in a general mailing list sense!
I am of the opinion that this mailing list should entirely be devoted to
a "Question and Answer" style, and that is all. So you point about
Top
of Bottom posting being irrelevant rings true. If people wish to
"discuss" open ended topics ("What XYZ Phone is the best?"
or "Is VOIP
going to cure world hunger?") then another mailing list should maybe be
started. "Asterisk - Users Technical" and "Asterisk - Users
Discussion"
maybe???
The problem with ignoring badly formatted replies is more often than not
the person replying couldn't careless if you ignored the reply but the
person asking the question will care, especially if the information
being supplied could be improved by your input! So sometimes its worth
being a little more forgiving, for example if the original poster did go
to significant lengths to provide a "good question".
I think the catch phrase should be "Ask good questions and Give good
answers". This includes all the things you mention.
It would be extremely helpful if everytime someone gets an answer to
their question as a way of thanks and etiquette they take it upon
themselves to ensure that this answer is now covered in the WIKI. If
this always happened and if people checked the WIKI the volume of repeat
mails would drop hugely.
For Example:
Original Poster ---> Asks Question
<LOOP>
Reply ---> Request Improved Question (more detail / config files / logs
/etc)
Original Poster ---> Resubmits Improved Question (Snipping irrelevant
info)
</LOOP>
Reply ---> Answer
Original Poster --> Reformats entire thread based on all answers and
ensures question and answer are covered in an intuitive section of the
WIKI
Just my opinion.
Alex
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Hello,> I must admit I live in perpetual fear of forgetting to switch of html or rtf formatting (useful for work) and top posting. I can understand the issue with the former but can see absolutely no reason why top posting is such a problem. In fact I'd far prefer it. I get to my e-mail in batches and bottom posting means I've got to wade through stuff I've just read. I totally agree with snipping extensively. > > So that I can understand the almost religious fervour on this point could someone please explain to me why top posting is so hated!!Because it's rude to assume that your post must be so important to everyone else that we will all take the time to try to determine the context in which you are making your reply. Top posters force people to page up and down through a message in order to determine the context. And while it may be stuff that *you* have just read, mail does not necessarily arrive in the same order for everyone else, so the replied-to message may not yet have been seen by other participants. Inline quoting allows you to visually skip the quoted material fairly easily (and many participants will do exactly that) *unless* one wants to find out context, which I personally find myself wanting to do maybe a quarter of the time. Top posting makes it impossible to reply to relevant parts within context: you've destroyed the context by doing so. Properly quoted inline text is handled very nicely by good mail clients, colored and highlighted appropriately so it is trivial to see, visually, what is going on. Top posting makes you look like a Microsoft-software-using weenie that is not aware of basic Internet etiquette and who is too lazy to be bothered to conform to basic community standards. Many people, myself included, will simply ditch your message if it becomes too hard to place your message in an appropriate context. I personally follow the "spacebar rule" at least 95% of the time... within Elm, I use the space bar to progress through mailing list traffic, and that means we only move forward through the text, unless something is /so/ compelling and interesting that it warrants further examination.> I can understand that if you are responding to multiple points in an e-mail then you should reply below each point snipping out what is irrelevant to your reply in the original e-mail. If you're responding to an entire e-mail then the proper approach to my mind would to do as you would in business letters and start with a short paragraph explaining what you're doing (e.g. "In response to Fred's e-mail about AMD MP motherboards and interrupts, ...". I guess most of us are too lazy to do this so we just leave the original text in the e-mail. If we're really lazy we don't snip the irrelevant stuff out.E-mail is intended to be an easy and informal method for information interchange. We already have a method for providing context, which works without having to summarize someone else's message, and which works through multiple layers of reply (which summarization fails to do concisely). You are *supposed* to be "lazy" and make use of this more intelligent mechanism, which good software will actually use in order to highlight text based on context, etc.> Am I missing something totally?! I'm just about to go and get my flak jacket and helmet in anticipation of the responses. :)Wrap your darn lines at 70. ("rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat", hope you're wearing that flak jacket! ;-) ) This turns out to be a basic netiquette issue for all the people who have joined the 'net. We did things a little differently in the days of BBS's (though we used in-line message quoting!) but most of us who joined from that community were able to adapt and work with the accepted netiquette of USENET and the Internet. It seems to be mainly the people who joined after the "endless september" (Google) that have felt that it is more appropriate for the Internet to reshape itself to their own convenience. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
George Gardiner wrote:> I must admit I live in perpetual fear of forgetting to switch of html or rtf formatting (useful for work) and top posting.A: Because otherwise we don't understand what you're replying to. Q: Why top posting is so frowned upon? Cheers, Gilad -- Gilad Ben-Yossef <gilad@codefidence.com> Codefidence. A name you can trust(tm) Web: http://codefidence.com | SIP: gilad@pbx.codefidence.com Tel: +972.9.8650475 ext. 201 | Fax: +972.9.8850643 "I am Jack's Overwritten Stack Pointer" -- Hackers Club, the movie
On 11-Nov-2004, George Gardiner wrote:> So that I can understand the almost religious fervour on this point could > someone please explain to me why top posting is so hated!!Hopefully this isn't just further fanning the flames, but here's the page I like to point people to which does a great job discussing both views: http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/ I realize that I've tipped my hand on my own preference simply by bottom- posting my reply. :) -- David McNett <nugget@slacker.com> http://slacker.com/~nugget/
Gregory Junker wrote:>> folder. No supplier gets a purchase if their people are not properly >> trained in e-mail communication. My employer spends quite a bit as>> You are kidding, right? "Properly trained"? By whose standards? What > international commerce committee on email standards published the > training regimen of which you speak?He just means these (Netiquette): http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanb/documents/quotingguide.html http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html -- Cheers, Matt Riddell _______________________________________________ http://www.sineapps.com/news.php (Daily Asterisk News - html) http://www.sineapps.com/rssfeed.php (Daily Asterisk News - rss)