[sclug] TopPosting Was: Helping others into FOSS/Linux

[Darren Davison]

On Wed, May 4, 2005 9:39, Patrick said:
> The reason Microsoft and commercial email clients top post is that
> usability studies show this is how people like it.

There is a significant number of people who certainly don't like it that way
at all.  The simple fact is, that *combined with prudent trimming* to provide
context, such responses are more inclusive for the wider audience. 
Top-posting and/or not trimming quoting alienates a much larger proportion of
that audience.  That's before considering the additional cost for those who
pay for bandwidth and therefore pay maybe a dozen times to receive the same
50Kb of text with one sentence added at the top each time.  Not such an issue
on the desktop these days of course, but certainly an issue for most mobile
device users.


>  No-one will buy something they don't like.

Of the people who use MS/Lotus clients, most do so because it's either
supplied with the OS they had chosen for them, or was supplied by the company
they work for.  A large numberof 'Doze users (the majority?) are not even
aware that choices exist - let alone what they are.  If you're implying that
there are commercial forces at work here at the *end user* level, I'd suggest
that to be fairly naive.


> The interesting question is why a standard was set without doing a
> usability study first.

They're not standards, they're a community-agreed etiquette and were "set" by
general user consensus (well before Microsoft started sponsoring the sort of
usability studies which show that people who have never used anything else
prefer their software).  I can't think of a more objective way to set such
"standards".

The more interesting question to me is why do [top-posters|non-trimmers]
compose email responses in a way that they would never dream of composing any
other form of written communication?


-- 
Darren Davison
Public Key: 0xDD356B0D