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#1
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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. |
#2
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top posting vs bottom posting
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 |
#3
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top posting vs bottom posting
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. |
#4
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top posting vs bottom posting
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 |
#5
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top posting vs bottom posting
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." |
#6
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top posting vs bottom posting
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. |
#7
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top posting vs bottom posting
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 |
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