[TowerTalk] Re:Posting replies....

[Didier Juges <didier@cox.net>]

Since there seems to be a shortfall of tower topics to talk about, I will 
say that:

If you properly edit the message you are responding to so that only the 
relevant portion is left, and you are only commenting on ONE question, 
concept or statement in the original message, it does not matter very much 
if you "top post" or "bottom post" (is that a proper term?)

However, sometimes you want to respond independently to a number of 
elements in a single message, there of course it is necessary to place your 
response immediately following the statement you are responding to, and 
break down the original message into fragments if necessary, with each 
fragment being followed by your comment, so that it is obvious what you are 
commenting on.

That's the way I usually do it now and I have not been flamed (for that) 
yet :-)

In my case, it is a result of using e-mail for more than casual business 
correspondence. I have found that in business, it is not always appropriate 
or practical to edit a message you are responding to, and in many cases, I 
prefer to keep the entire original message, particularly when I copy my 
response to people who did not necessarily receive the original message. In 
this case, the thread can get quite long, and top posting is a necessity. 
So, on newsgroups, I tend to do the same thing out of habit (which is not 
necessarily a good reason for doing things, I'll admit.)

netiquette is about practicality and efficiency. Nothing says that it 
cannot change to reflect current ways of doing things, and current tools 
that make it more convenient. The internet was created by people who did 
not want to do things the old way, so let's not get ourselves locked into 
an old way just because that's the way we did it back then. By the way, I 
was there back then, posting to BBS's, uucp and then usenet through a 300 
baud modem I built in the early 80's.

73,
Didier KO4BB

At 07:54 PM 1/3/2004, Zach White wrote:
> A: Because it's not how conversation flows.
> Q: Why shouldn't I top post?
> -Zach


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