Re: Top posting

From: Chuck McManis (cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com)
Date: 03/20/04

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    Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 22:41:14 -0800
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org

    At 03:24 PM 3/19/2004, you wrote:
    >Top-posting may be an opinion, but RFC 1855 makes it _standard_ opinion.

    Let's get serious for a minute here. Just because someone wrote up an
    INFORMATIONAL RFC does NOT make it STANDARD. It makes it INFORMATIONAL. Big
    difference. Go look up RFC 2026 for what it takes to become a standard.

    I wonder what it would be like if you went to a cocktail party and before
    you could say anything in a conversation you first had to say everything
    that everyone else had said. I suppose you could turn it into a drinking
    game (if you missed some bit you would be forced to take a drink) but it
    would only be entertaining for a short time.

    Netiquette guidelines are like C coding styles, subject to great rip
    roaring debates. My personal pet peeve is 600 lines of included text only
    to get to the bottom line which adds "This is how I feel about it too." I
    loved tin(1)'s filter that popped back and said "Hmm, more than 50%
    included text, perhaps you want to either add more content or delete some
    of the text." Only to have complete morons who would add 20 lines of "--
    filler text to main tin happy --" lines! Can you believe how stupid that
    is? No, I didn't think so. But its true.

    And top posting or bottom posting just including all that text is a
    complete waste on an archive list like this one since anyone who "doesn't
    get it" need only go to the archive to "figure it out." Instead a thread
    like this has easily 10x the character count of the actual characters used
    in new text. Even good text compression can help that much. So you end up
    with the servers that archive this for posterity (Hi Mom!) overflowing with
    redundant information. If you could somehow mandate top posting and train
    people who want to catch up to read from the bottom up on the first message
    of the thread they read, then you could archive the entire thread and chop
    off the messages as soon as you got to a line of included text and the
    archived version would be completely readable from front to back for posterity.

    But no one seems to have these sorts of "deep thoughts" and what we get is,
    well whatever someone things is best. And as we can see reading this
    thread, some think one way and some think another. That's my working
    definition of "difference of opinion." :-) That's why generally I scan
    through the text and extract the content. My comment was merely a
    counterpoint in the harmony of discussion.

    --Chuck

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