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

[Smylers]

Roger Greenwood writes:

> 1. Most of the world seems to do it that way already

Quite possibly -- but it's still rare in the bits of the world I get
into e-mail threads with.  (Note 'threads' is the important bit.  When
I'm swapping news with a family member it's much less relevant.)

> 2. You can read the reply immediately

Only if you can remember what it's about.  If you're in 'batch' mode
reading an entire thread then you'll still have in your mind the post
being replied to.  But if you read the previous message some time ago
then you need some context to be able to understand the current message
-- at which point a quotation of a few lines (possibly nested, from
multiple previous mails) is much more useful than having the entire
previous correspondence in reverse order.

> without scrolling

In the cases where you know the context, the quoted parts are easy to
identify (and therefore skip over).  Every mail client I've used marks
them in a different colour (for easy visual skipping).

Currently I use Mutt, in which pressing S skips past the current quoted
section, and SLRN, in which Tab does the skipping and T toggles reducing
all quotes to a single line; I'd expect other decent client software to
have similar functionality.

> my finger hovers over the delete key when reading mail. If you have to
> read the whole message again to remember the context then go ahead -
> scroll.

My finger hovers over the space bar when ploughing through threads at
speed.  It's incredibly annoying to get to the end of a message and be
paging through screeds of irrelevant previous messages, in their
entireties (and not marked with ">", to be identified as quotations).

Putting the quoted message at the end doesn't prevent scrolling -- it
just pushes it to other places.  The best way to avoid inflicting
unnecessary scrolling on readers is to quote the least you need for
context.

Smylers