[SLUG] Discussion List Guidelines

[Al Girling]

On Sun, Apr 16, 2006 at 02:54:57PM BST, Martin Webb wrote:
> *Whilst looking on the Scarborough Linux User Group website for 
> information about Weds 19th's meeting, I re-read the following in the 
> List Guidelines:
> 
> 7.* Make your posts read from top to bottom. The MS practice of 
> encouraging replies at the top of messages means massive amounts of 
> bandwidth are wasted.
> 
> Could someone explain the bit about wasted bandwidth.  I'm interested 
> because clients are asking questions about whether to reply at top or 
> bottom of original message.  I tell them 'bottom', but can't explain why.

Hi Martin,

As the author of the piece you quote I feel I should say a thing or two
to clarify things for you.

John and Steve are both correct to say the bandwidth issue comes from
the failure to trim the quoted text to just the piece to which you are
replying.  Top or bottom posting it doesn't really make much difference
provided you trim all the excess stuff.  You'll notice I don't actually
say that you must post at the bottom of the message.  Rather make the
post reads from top to bottom.  This is just common sense as I'm sure
you'll agree.  How many times have you seen a signature saying something
similar to:

A: Because it messes up the flow of conversation.

Q: Why is top posting bad?

As an example of how messages can grow.  I un-subscribed from a mailing
list because of the huge size of messages being sent because of
un-trimmed replies.  I was still using dial-up at the time, so when one
e-mail in a thread passed 1Mb I said enough was enough.

Pure bottom posting without trimming can be equally as bad as Chris
points out.  You should aim to make your replies flow within the
message.  Correctly attribute each author of the various layers of
quotes and use some form of the "> " method of signifying quoted text.
Most *nix mail clients make this even easier by displaying depth of
quoted text in different colours too.

I must say that this isn't a Linux thing.  I was told to construct
e-mail like this on a mailing list several years before I'd heard of
Linux.  It seems to be the way people who have been writing e-mail for
several decades work and I simply followed their advise.  If you
subscribe to any moderately technical list you'll find the same
guidelines.

HTH

Toodle pip,

Al

-- 
Al Girling

Home page:                  <http://al.sdf-eu.org>
Linux User: #290080         <http://counter.li.org>
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