top posting vs bottom posting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Bottom-posting


anybody who says they have never seen anyone/anything stating bottom posting is preferred on USENET
hasn't bothered to look.

Fred wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Bottom-posting


anybody who says they have never seen anyone/anything stating bottom
posting is preferred on USENET hasn't bothered to look.

Don't confuse the undesirable untrimmed noncontextualized bottompost with
properly contexted and trimmed replies.

Neither (untrimmed noncontexted disorderly) top posting nor (untrimmed
noncontexted) bottom posting are optimal ways to reply.

The wiki article alludes to the issue of untrimmed bottomposting being
undesirable. It also gives an illustration of 'double quoting' using very
aggressive trimming context followed by a TOFU textover fullquote under
'trailer'.

Illustrations of optimal posts in properly attributed trimmed and
contexted style are found at numerous sites such as
http://www.anta.net/misc/nnq/nquote.shtml Quoting style in newsgroup
postings


--
Mike Easter

John wrote:
On 10 Apr 2009 20:18:35 GMT, Fred wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Bottom-posting


anybody who says they have never seen anyone/anything stating bottom
posting is preferred on USENET hasn't bothered to look.

Ive looked now . . .

Top-posting
Top-posting includes the entire parent message (and usually previous
messages) verbatim, with the reply above it. It is
sometimes referred to by the term TOFU, an acronym for "Text Over,
Fullquote Under". It is the default implemented by
Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Gmail, and others, and resembles
forwarding messages with new text prepended at the
top.

I see a definition but nothing that states a preference.
It works well in some technical groups where frequently there is a single
answer to a problem, especially if the question is long and the answer is
short.

In groups where a thread may have hundreds of responses it is a pain and
generally worthless.
The comment may referee to something far down in the body of the post and
you can only hope that you line up the response with what and who is being
responded to.

Mike Painter wrote:
John wrote:

Top-posting

It works well in some technical groups where frequently there is a
single answer to a problem, especially if the question is long and the
answer is short.

Top posting definitely does not work well in technical groups where the
reply words most definitely need to be placed directly beneath and in
direct and precise responsiveness to those context words.

In groups where a thread may have hundreds of responses it is a pain and
generally worthless.
The comment may referee to something far down in the body of the post
and you can only hope that you line up the response with what and who
is being responded to.

What the comment is referring to is exactly what is the big problem with
untrimmed bottom posting and also untrimmed top posting.

Such uncontexted remarks interfere with the clarity of the communication.
Typically any remark which is made without a trimmed context is a remark
which appears as if the replier can not read comprehensively or reply
responsively -- because the non-contexted words tend to 'miss the mark'.
The reply appears to reflect that the replier started thinking about
something they wanted to say and then shut out the exact words to which
they are going to try to reply, and so instead of really replying
specifically, instead they 'sort of' reply to something or other else
which isn't exactly what the message (which they failed to specifically
cite) *actually* said.

As a result, trying to carry on a conversation in which someone is
bullheaded insisting on not replying in context is often futile. That is
why many top posters who acknowledge that they know they are offending a
conversation by treating it destructively (disordered nonconversational)
are killfiled by those who become frustrated with their style.

Top posters seem to be both confused and justified by nontrimming
noncontexting bottom posters. That's why I don't think the term 'bottom
posting' should ever be applied to those who post in context, even if a
contexted reply may sometimes be located entirely at the end of a very
short message to which it replies.


--
Mike Easter

Fred wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Bottom-posting


anybody who says they have never seen anyone/anything stating bottom
posting is preferred on USENET hasn't bothered to look.

Don't confuse the undesirable untrimmed noncontextualized bottompost with
properly contexted and trimmed replies.

Neither (untrimmed noncontexted disorderly) top posting nor (untrimmed
noncontexted) bottom posting are optimal ways to reply.

The wiki article alludes to the issue of untrimmed bottomposting being
undesirable. It also gives an illustration of 'double quoting' using very
aggressive trimming context followed by a TOFU textover fullquote under
'trailer'.

The article covers multiple points and it was not my intention that one is better or more
correct according to the article. While it is true my preference is for bottom posting, my
intention was to point out if one had never seen reference to the preference for USENT they
had not looked very hard.

Quoting the article:

"Some believe that "top-posting" is appropriate for interpersonal e-mail, but inline
posting should always be applied to threaded discussions such as newsgroups. Objections to
top-posting on newsgroups, as a rule, seem to come from persons who first went online in
the earlier days of Usenet, and in communities that date to Usenet's early days. Among the
most vehement communities are those in the Usenet comp.lang hierarchy, especially
comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++. Top-posting is more tolerated on the alt hierarchy. Newer
online participants, especially those with limited experience of Usenet, tend to be less
sensitive to arguments about posting style."

Preferred by who?

Fred wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-posting#Bottom-posting


anybody who says they have never seen anyone/anything stating bottom
posting is preferred on USENET hasn't bothered to look.

Fred wrote:

Quoting the article:

"Some believe that "top-posting" is appropriate for interpersonal
e-mail, but inline posting should always be applied to threaded
discussions such as newsgroups. Objections to top-posting on
newsgroups, as a rule, seem to come from persons who first went online
in the earlier days of Usenet, and in communities that date to Usenet's
early days. Among the most vehement communities are those in the Usenet
comp.lang hierarchy, especially comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++.
Top-posting is more tolerated on the alt hierarchy. Newer online
participants, especially those with limited experience of Usenet, tend
to be less sensitive to arguments about posting style."

I think the article has a lot of useful information, but not nearly
enough.

The point I am trying to emphasize is that the problem with not contexting
a reply goes beyond whether the non-contexted reply is located at the top
or the bottom of the reply. Failing to context a reply most often results
in an inferior (nonreponsive) reply regardless of whether it is out of
context on the top or the bottom, but the inferiority is even worse when
the contextless reply is on the top than when the contextless reply is on
the bottom for several reasons.

- the conversational order and the attribution condition is destroyed by
ontop contextless
- the ontop contextless replier generally can no longer see the words
which /should/ have been put into the context; whereas the onbottom
contextless replier *can* see the words which s/he should have trimmed for
and put into context
- OTOH the trimming contextualizing respondent can not only *see* the
essential context words, but in the process of trimming has carefully
isolated and reread that exact context so that it is firmly embedded in
hir thoughts as s/he begins to type hir reply, so the reply is 'on the
money'.

It is the quality of the communication that is the big problem in
newsgroups - where the nuances of telephonic or face to face voice
inflections and body gestures and facial expressions and pauses and rises
and falls in the voice and mood of the speaker all filter into the actual
words.

In typed text communications there is so very much lacking that to put
some other kinds of hindrances on the communication quality seems to cross
over a line that says, "We might as well not be trying to have this
conversation if you are going to whisper your communications so that I
only hear a part of it and that part is sometimes nonresponsive to what I
said."


--
Mike Easter