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Posted by Toby Inkster on 01/23/07 17:08
user wrote:
> I 'stopped' bottom posting quit some time ago. Reason, I took a lot more
> to read bottom posts than top posts. As you state even at it's best
> bottom posts suffer from people 'not' cutting.
People who don't snip their quotes properly are arguably worse than top
posters.
With unsnipped bottom posting, you have to wade through tonnes of useless
drivel to get to the point. With unsnipped top posting, you don't have to
wade through all that drivel, but it's still there at the end of the
message, wasting hundreds of megabytes[1] per post!
Conservative quoting, adding your comments interspersed within the quoted
material, and trimming out any parts of the original message to which
you're not directly replying will produce a far more legible response than
any other method. It will save your readers unnecessarily paging through
great swathes of quoted material to find a few lines of original material
beneath.
Of course, it's a little more effort than mindlessly starting to type
wherever your news client plonks the cursor (be that at the top or the
bottom), but that extra effort *saves* effort for the dozens, perhaps
hundreds, thousands, or in the case of a few special messages, millions[2]
of people who are going to read your article.
This is the way I've always posted, and I can't recall ever having
received any complaints about my style -- and I have posted to groups
where both top and bottom posting is the norm.
But, in the end, to each their own. "user", you have free will[3], and
although I hope you give my arguments presented above some thought, you
are perfectly free to continue posting in your current manner. I too have
free will, and am free to consider you an obnoxious twerp if you carry on
top-posting, and may well choose not to answer the questions raised by
said twerp in the future.
Kindest regards,
____
1. Say one post, with 100 lines at about 50 characters per line is
about 5 kB. Now distribute that over a thousand news servers and
you've got 5 MB. How many usenet servers are there? In my brief
research, estimates seem to be around the 100,000 mark, so that's
500 MB of wasted space.
2. I'm sure there must be at least a million people who have since
read Linus Torvalds' announcement of the first release of Linux.
3. Many philosophers and scientists are beginning to dispute the
existance of free will. Personally, I'm 100% with them, having
always considered free will to be a paradox in a universe where
future events are dictated by the laws of causality. Nevertheless,
whether or not free will is simply an illusion, the "coping
strategy" of an intelligent mind in a dertiministic universe, one
must live one's life, *as if* one has free will.
--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
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