[Wylug-discuss] List Etiquette: Top Posting vs. Bottom Posting

[Dave Fisher]

Hi All,

I don't want to give even the feintest hint of personal criticism or
'laying down the law' on this matter, but the recent rash of top-posting
does prompt me to ask members the following questions:

  1. Should we continue to maintain our long-term policy of asking
     people to bottom post?

  2. If you believe that the policy should be maintained, what do you
     think we should do about top-posting?

For what it's worth, my personal opinion is that bottom posting still
offers significant advantages for threaded discussion, especially where
long threads are involved and where there are any number of interleaved
responses.

If you are a committed supporter of top-posting, please note the
qualifications I've just made. 

I fully appreciate that MS Outlook has virtually enforced top posting of
1-to-1 email across great swathes of t'Internet.

Moreover, I'd even endorse the idea that top-posting has several
important communicative advantages in everyday email, e.g. seeing the
most pertinent message first, before wading into the record of prior
discussion.

While I'd personally like to maintain bottom posting, I'd prefer
consistent top-posting to a free-for-all miscellany of top-, bottom- and
middle-posting.

In my experience, the need to readjust both reading and writing modes on
a message by message basis is a right pain in the neck, wrist and brain

... and I'd even go so far as to claim that mixing posting modes makes
it objectively difficult to follow more than 2 or 3 steps in a threaded
discussion.

Your thoughts, please.

Dave