The solution is eliminate the context information in the message. Treat it like a conversation. Makes the top and bottom poster fanatics happy because they have no way to tell. I'm happy because all the important stuff is immediately available in the message box.
w..
Its the year 2004 now, and there are these great things called threaded newsreaders. In reality you'd go to the first post in the thread if you wanted to read them all.
eg
you click on the first post in the thread
"Bill! How the heck are you?"
having read that, press the down utton do the next message is selected.
"Good, and you?"
press down again, etc etc
I don't see whats so hard about it.
Seeing some people here are acting like its a religous issue, this is my last post on the matter.
Al
Out of curiosity, what version do you use? Mine is 6.1.
Vadim
That may be your reality, but it's not mine. In my reality, I read posts several times a day. I have no way of knowing when a thread has finished, and I should go to the first post and start reading. In fact, I limit the number of posts I store to 15 days, so it's common for the first post to be gone days (or weeks) before the last post in the thread. Furthermore, if that's how I worked, how would I ever contribute to an on-going thread?
Or are you suggesting that I should start at the beginning of the thread every time? I don't think so - there are roughly 200 threads for the last 15 days in this newsgroup alone, and it's not even the most active group I subscribe to, by a long shot.
>-- Al Balmer Balmer Consulting removebalmerconsultingthis@att.net
You are, of course, correct.
I just felt that "Crossposters who post to more than three of four newsgroups or fail to ensure that the message is totally relevant to all of them or who fail to set the Followup-To: header properly ought to be hung by their heels and fed a powerful laxative with their head in a bucket" somehow wasn't as funny as "Crossposters ought to be hung by their heels and fed a powerful laxative with their head in a bucket."
:)
Unless the original message has already been read. In which case you have to retrieve that message first, which takes more than just a click. Or you're in a group that has a low retention rate (ie, about
3 or 4 days for me with alt groups). In reality, threaded newsreaders existed before the masses got onto the internet, they're not new creations.Generally you just need to see the latest message and enough of a previous message to put it into context. You don't need to see the whole thread except if you're new to the thread. The times that bottom posting annoys people is when people don't bother trimming the earlier messages and you've got hundres of old lines followed by an "I agree" (also when they post amazingly large ascii pictures because of neuroses gained through traumatic toilet training). I rarely see top posting where the previous messages are edited first, but this is very common for bottom posting. Which leads to the hypothesis that top posting is lazier.
Of course, the _real_ reason for bottom posting is because it is traditional and that's what everyone is used to. The people who try to break out of this sometimes fall into the "my needs are more important than yours" trap. You tend to see a mixture of top and bottom posting on the more anarchic or contentious groups, and mostly just one or the other only on the more civil groups. When everyone requests bottom posting and someone refuses, it is an insult, plain and simple.
I had a coworker once that refused to follow the department's guideline on keep program lines to 80 characters or less. He defended it with "I've got a modern editor that can do very wide lines, so I don't see why I have to be stuck in the past." Then I showed him how my editor could indeed expand very wide just like his, which surprised but didn't convince him. Arguments that long lines are harder to read, you had to use small fonts to see it all, printouts are ugly, his peers were getting angry, etc, all fell on deaf ears. _He_ liked long lines, and damn the standards. He was otherwise a nice guy, but he hated doing things someone else's way (he later become CTO of a dotcom for awhile before it went under).
--
Darin Johnson
My shoes are too tight, and I have forgotten how to dance -- Babylon 5
the
You're welcome :-)
Ehhh, menu Format->Decrease Indent .... :-))
Meindert
Hmmmm... I don't have it. This is Outlook 2000 SR-1. I see you have Outlook Express - the menus must be different. Anyway, I'm glad the button is there and you knew about it :-)
The help says there's no menu option, but there are shortcuts. The increase indent shortcut (ctrl-t) works, but the decrease indent (ctrl-shift-T) doesn't. Ah, well, we probably need a patch.
-- Al Balmer Balmer Consulting removebalmerconsultingthis@att.net
My pet hate is idiots who argue that top posting is OK because "you don't need all that context rubbish anyway, just read the thread", and leave the ENTIRE FSCKING THREAD dangling off the end of their stupid post.
If it's so unnecessary, bloody well snip it!
-- Burn the land and boil the sea, You can't take the sky from me.
Do you know ANYONE who advocates this?
/bin/mail wipe_me snipped-for-privacy@chello.nl < /dev/clue
-- Burn the land and boil the sea, You can't take the sky from me.
It's pretty simple, you quote text that you are responding to, you delete stuff that you're not responding to, just like I've done here.
-- Burn the land and boil the sea, You can't take the sky from me.
The "previous post in the thread" will be something different in different parts of the world, and on different news servers. It is quite common for example for responses to a particular message to arrive at various places before the message itself.
-- Burn the land and boil the sea, You can't take the sky from me.
The solution to what?
-- Burn the land and boil the sea, You can't take the sky from me.
Which side of the road do you drive on? The same as everyone else?
Or maybe you drive the opposite way to everyone else, and wonder how long it will be before your way is accepted.
-- Burn the land and boil the sea, You can't take the sky from me.
If only the top-posters were'nt so lazy to remove the old stuff (in most news-readers/email clients it just a matter of a click in the preferences dialog).
But I had the discussion with my boss (hi Roland), and he claims, that he knows his question/text so no need to read the reply. Don't know if I could convince him to bottom-post even in email :( ?
-- 42Bastian Do not email to bastian42@yahoo.com, it's a spam-only account :-) Use @epost.de instead !
In article , Bob Stephens writes: |> What I find interesting is that top posting is the de facto standard for |> email replies and I have never heard *anyone* bitch about it.
It is not de-facto standard. It's just the braindead standard behavior of Microsoft's Outbreak Excess ... Just like sending Mails both plain text and HTML.
A couple of years ago people still wrote proper emails with correct citation, trimming etc.
OTOH, you have to be glad these days if the emails still contain actual text and are not just embedding a Word document which in term contains the real message...
Rainer
Well, I am very glad that I am on cable now. This whole thread is a waste of bandwidth because the topic being discussed is more of a religion than a matter of fact. But I guess the old arguments have to be dragged out of storage every once in a while to let other people know that they still care...
All of you, face it, newsgroups are not a uniform medium with standards or regulations. Do it the way you like and dummy up about what others do. This is worse than the actual top/bottom posting mix.
-- Rick "rickman" Collins rick.collins@XYarius.com Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY removed. Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com 4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX
WHAT??? You were doing this before 1980? AOL was around long before the Internet was common and they competed against Compuserve as a BBS type of system. I thought you were still in your twenties or thirties...
There have got to be better ways of having fun...
-- Rick "rickman" Collins rick.collins@XYarius.com Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY removed. Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com 4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX
Top or bottom posting.
Yes
No, make that yes.
-- ...The Bit Eimer [remove keinewurst to email me]
"My goal in life is to be the kind of person my cat thinks he is"
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