[sclug] Short propagation means top posting is good? Oh no it doesn't!

[Simon Huggins]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 01:23:13PM +0100, Roland Turner (SCLUG) wrote:
> Simon Huggins wrote:
> > A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion
> > Q. Why is top posting bad?
> Ah yes, reasoning by humour :-)

Someone else's at that ;)

[snip]
> Top-posting corporate email users are, by contrast, accustomed to
> propogation delays of minutes and, more importantly, of having email
> messages be seen in substantially the same sequence by all recipients,
> on which

> Neil Owens wrote:
> > But this doesn't hold true if the question and answer were sent in two
> > separate e-mails.  EVERYONE, Microsoft/Lotus users included would read the
> > oldest message first (the question) then the newest message (the answer).
> Which is rather the point, and quite probably why heavy corporate users
> (a) don't clutter their email with closely edited quoting and (b) are
> puzzled when the geeks start bitching about top-posting.

Ah no see, I'm very lazy and quite good at reacting to things quickly
given enough context but not very good at storing all the context I
read.

I get silly amounts of list mail and I skim read lots of lists
deliberately so when I *do* dig into a subject that interests me I want
to find all the context I need to understand the issue (and also the
correct attribution and threading so I can find the parent message
easily and work out what the original poster really meant).

That's definitely a propagation of minutes time frame and I'm always in
and out of different mail folders all day long so whilst I can your
point here I don't think it does apply to me and in fact think that the
shorter propagation time doesn't favour top-posting.

But maybe that's just the way I read email.

Simon, who's been battling to replace a dead motherboard in a server all
day.

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