Top-posting

Tue Apr 12 06:45:52 UTC 2011

Hi Paul,

Your point is taken - but actually this is a bit of a conundrum, at least for me.

Generally what I see is that younger people who grew up using email when they were children desire to bottom post or post inline whereas folks that originally utilized email primarily to communicate technical information only generally prefer to top-post.

I believe that top-posting is fine and that have also found use for (what do they call it, reverse-hugarian or reverse-polish) notation for doing things like naming and structuring software packages to also be immensely useful.

Either way, I ultimately agree with you - except with the possible exception that possibly if the NaNog list really care - they could setup a survey of all list members, have everybody vote, then we know on this list that when we ask questions where we expect timely answers we can expect the answers to possibly be buried in a myriad of text.  Another problem with bottom-posting is the <SNIP> of anything above, etc.

Cheers - and sorry for having a little late night fun bothering everybody with noting something that I have seen mostly as a social change on how people communicate via email over the past 30 years.

- Mike

P.S. - meanwhile, for an email list like NaNog - I am still hoping that most folks want efficiency on answers to questions - and if the need old data are clever enough to realize that there are plenty of ways via HTTP to find those 'weirdo top-post commentors' listed with their posts in chronological and/or relevance level - with prior commentary properly sorted.
- mfd

On Apr 11, 2011, at 11:06 PM, Paul Ferguson wrote:

> I am top-posting to show that this entire thread is retarded.
> 
> I certainly could have bottom-posted, because I don't use Outlook for
> this list, but the point here is -- is this what the NANOG list has
> really become? Really?
> 
> So sad.
> 
> - ferg
> 
> 
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 10:55 PM, Dobbins, Roland <rdobbins at arbor.net> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Apr 12, 2011, at 12:42 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> 
>>> I have used Evolution and IMAP with exchange servers in the past, so, I'm not convinced this is an entirely accurate statement.
>> 
>> 
>> And in fact, I'm posting this message in plain-text via the OSX Mail.app connected via native Exchange protocols to an Exchange server.
>> 
>> There's even a plug-in for Mail.app in order to make inline posting easier.
>> 
> 
> -- 
> "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
>  Engineering Architecture for the Internet
>  fergdawgster(at)gmail.com
>  ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/
> 