[wplug] A question of etiquette

[Brandon Kuczenski]

I have been noticing a trend on the various technical and non-technical 
mailing lists to which I am subscribed, and I'm curious as to what WPLUG 
folk think.

I was "raised" on the idea that top-posting, meaning putting the text of 
your response to a posting ABOVE the text to which the response was 
directed, was *bad*.  The idea being that when reading the mail 
(presumably on a console), one would want to see the context of the email 
in chronological order, so that he or she may best formulate a reply. 
However, I have noticed that practically nobody in my other mailing lists 
does this, and people have even requested that I cease my 'bottom posting' 
because they can't find my responses to their emails, that they must go 
"burrowing" throughout the body of the email [text-only, of course, 
rendered in a non-fixed-width font], free-email-provider headers intact
and all, in order to figure out which part of it they had written, and 
which had come from me.

Even in discussions with my professors, or with other technically minded 
people, I've noticed a mixture of 'top-posting' and 'bottom-posting'. 
Perhaps the orthodoxy of the issue has ceased to be relevant.

I suppose, what I am really interested in, is the amount of 'evangelism' 
the open-source community wants to be involved with vis-a-vis top-posting. 
Is it even important at all?

Just curious about list opinions.

Regards,
Brandon