[Gllug] Threaded email clients

[John Winters]

On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 07:38 +0100, Peter Childs wrote:
> Most people actually perfer top posting because they can see what new 
> without having to scroll or read through alot of old rubbish. I've 
> actually had customers complain about bottom posting.

This is a commonly-used straw man argument.  It is indeed true that if
you're going to blindly quote the whole of the preceding discussion,
without any attempt to remove the dross or restrict your quoting to what
is relevant then yes, most people will prefer you to put your comments
at the beginning rather than at the end.  However, no-one anywhere is
proposing "indiscriminate quoting followed by new material" as a posting
technique.  To say that "indiscriminate quoting preceded by new
material" is preferable is thus to miss the point.

The preferred method of posting, on this and the vast majority of
technical discussion lists, is to quote only that which is relevant and
gives immediate context to your comments, then put your new material
immediately after the stuff to which you're responding.  This is a much
clearer way of writing than either of the two approaches in my previous
paragraph.

In summary, there are three general appproaches to posting, listed here
in order from best to worst.

1) Selectively quote from whatever article you are following up to,
including only that material which is necessary to give your reply
context.  Put your comments immediately after the quoted material to
which they relate.

2) Quote the whole of the previous article, putting your comments before
it.

3) Quote the whole of the previous article, putting your comments after
it.

Whilst you are quite right in saying that 2) is better than 3), number
1) is far better than either of them - so much so that you will annoy
people if you continue to use either 2) or 3).  Such behaviour carries
the sub-text that the poster can't be bothered to make any effort when
composing the post, and the usual reaction to that is to say, "Well I
can't be bothered to read it then".  A little effort by the poster saves
a vast amount of effort for the readers.

HTH
John

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug