[wplug] A question of etiquette

[Bill Moran]

Brandon Kuczenski <brandon at 301south.net> wrote:

> 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?

There are some cases where it doesn't matter.  Such as a single reply to
the entire email.  But my habit is to post that single reply at the bottom.

Inline reply is an absolute must when an email is long and you have to
reply to multiple parts of it.  I agree that a lot of people either don't
understand this, or are too lazy to do it.  I think it's bad netiquette
to always top post, I just think that an increasingly larger percentage
of people have no concept of netiquette.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com