Unnamed Administration sources reported that Charles Scott said:
> Am I the only one who objects to HTML-formatted postings on a
> listserv?
...
No. I say we make it a requirement to use a text based mailer (pine?) to
participate in this list. What else would a real network operator be
using anyway?
I would welcome a filter/bounce scheme.
Next on my "have a little list" is those who top-post. If they
can't scroll to the bottom and edit their quotes; I have some
special mirror classes to install on them with superglue....
They say the brain adjusts in a few days.....
People who top post actually bother you? Is the other way around for me, and
several people I know. I always just figured people who bottom posted were
too lazy to go back to the top of the mail. Who'd a thunk? HTML, on
the other hand, is just not quite right. Sad thing is, in a support role,
you have to try and read it, because a percentage of your users aren't
quite clueful enough to turn it off. At a large company that I used
to work for(a maker of a very popular email program(begins with E) the sysadmins
talked to the dev folks into shipping the internal product with Plain Text
set instead of HTML.
Being quite a newbie at this (having only done email and Fidonet since
1987 (mostly Fido, email not until 1991)) I'd say that historically
top-posting is a MEMO standard thingie, being done mostly by GUI users (ie
Microsoft/Mac prone) and email/Fidonet have always been bottom-posters (or
rather, actually quoting with > and commenting after each section of
text).
Top posting and leaving the whole email under what you wrote, I did not
see att all basically until Outlook and Eudora (and alike) started showing
up as email clients in the wider population.
Funnily enough, I always blamed pine as the original sinner. In its
default configuration it wants you to reply at the top; It even puts your
signature above the original message.
Pi
* Todd Suiter sez:
: People who top post actually bother you? Is the other way around for me, and
It's not so much the people but the traffic. Top-Posting usually means
Fullquote. Almost no top-poste I know bothers to shorten the content
below his own $0.01. That said, let's just assume 10 top-posters with
reasonably long texts in a row and you've got from 10 to 100 times more
traffic than botton-postings. Multiply this by 1000 mailing list
subscribers or some 10.000 Newsservers and you add quite some traffic to
the 'net.
Now let's just think for less than 3 seconds about the guys who make
Mailing Lists happen. These guys and gals do it - in most cases - out of
enthusiasm, paying bandwidth and server resources so _you_ can read and
post. Adding extra traffix to their tab does not strike me as social
behavior at all.
I always saw Top/Bottom as some kind of age- (netwise) and
clue-indicator, the former being a sure sign of less than 3 years of
netizenship. That might just be me and should not influence your
preferences, tho. Neither should the fact that in most European and
American cultures text is read from top to bottom, assuming timelines
and question/response pairs associated with the flow of information we
receive and process. Unless you're an avvid Jeopardy fan, you might see
my point here, I guess.
So, that makes three reasons not to Top-Post, one of which I consider
important. Just think about it, and then let's see how you like your new
life as a bottom-poster.
I really have to wonder how many of you are/have been postmasters for fortune
500 companies. t
> Top posting and leaving the whole email under what you wrote, I did not
> see att all basically until Outlook and Eudora (and alike) started showing
> up as email clients in the wider population.
Funnily enough, I always blamed pine as the original sinner. In its
default configuration it wants you to reply at the top; It even puts your
signature above the original message.
I really have to wonder how many of you are/have been postmasters for fortune
500 companies. t
ps now everyone is happy, forget i said anything.
(last one I swear) IF a thread gets to be that long, it belongs in a newsgroup or forum. And, personally, I don't like editing other folks' stuff, stupid
or not, i think of their words as their property...
(and I honestly can't figure out why I'm contributing to this thread:)) t
* Todd Suiter sez:
It's not so much the people but the traffic. Top-Posting usually means
Fullquote. Almost no top-poste I know bothers to shorten the content
below his own $0.01. That said, let's just assume 10 top-posters with
reasonably long texts in a row and you've got from 10 to 100 times
more traffic than botton-postings. Multiply this by 1000 mailing list
subscribers or some 10.000 Newsservers and you add quite some traffic
to the 'net.
While being guilty of being a top poster many times, I generally do prune
the text below. I completely agree with you about people not pruning. I
have a customer who for whatever reason can't remember to just send email
to noc@ and instead, finds the last email he sent to me and just top-posts
to it. I've gotten a few that had messages months old appended to the
bottom. <g>
I always saw Top/Bottom as some kind of age- (netwise) and
clue-indicator, the former being a sure sign of less than 3 years of
netizenship.
I wouldn't consider this an acid test with respect to either. I've been
connected since 1985 and still top-post at times.
American cultures text is read from top to bottom, assuming timelines
and question/response pairs associated with the flow of information we
receive and process. Unless you're an avvid Jeopardy fan, you might
see my point here, I guess.
There are times where your reply, although it contributes to the topic at
hand, may be much shorter than the message to which you are
responding. If you're posting a two sentence response to a 2 page
dissertation that someone else posted in a thread, it is much less time
consuming for other readers to see your response and signature at the top
with the referenced post below. I can't count how many times I've had to
scroll down 3 pages to see a response like "I agree. ---sig".
I guess this is a good reason to either not top-post or to at least prune
the information below your post to those points you're to which you're
responding.
So, that makes three reasons not to Top-Post, one of which I consider
important. Just think about it, and then let's see how you like your
new life as a bottom-poster.
OK. So, the lesson we've learned today is:
TOP POSTER = BOTTOM FEEDER? 
Point? Probably that if you're a postmaster for a large site, you see all SORTS
of stupidity that makes the top/bottom quoting seem trivial in comparison.
My favorite roadkill on the Infobahn:
User complains he can't post to a Listserv, because his postings are rejected
as "too long", even though he was only posting short messages. Oddly enough,
his mail was about 6,000 lines long - 20 lines of complaint, followed by a
signature block that started with 'begin 644 big-n-deep.gif' and ended some
6,000 lines of uuencoded data later with an 'end'. Decorum prevents my saying
what the uuencoded data was, but you can guess from the filename. 
So I drop him a note of the form "It's probably the fact that you have a 6K
line .signature".. I get a reply back "I guess this *also* means I should
call my ISP and cancel the tech support call about Eudora taking forever to
send mail?"
Count your blessings, guys and girls..