TOP POSTING

[Peter Coghlan]

>
> Er nope it just refers to android
>
> R

He didn't include a signature in that message.  Try looking at an earlier one.

Here's another explaination.

When someone receives this message, where are they supposed to start reading?

They have to rummage through to the middle to find where it started, read
the question originally asked, read down to see my answer, jump to the top to
read the request for further clarification, read further to see my reply to
that and so on.  This gets really tedious when trying to follow a discussion.

Top posting may work ok for emails between individuals, assuming they can live
with only reading the first few lines of each mail.  On a mailing list, it's
too much to assume that everyone will have archived all the mails that went
back and forth on the particular topic and will be immediately familar with
all the discussions that might be in progress at any one time.  When someone
receives a long mailing list posting starting with (for example):

"When I tried that, I got smoke coming out of the power supply"

there then follows a session of jumping up and down through the email trying to
find exactly which piece of advice the poster was following when they got this
result.  To do this, they have to find the points in the email where to jump
backwards and forwards.  Sometimes there are clues such as included headers. 
Sometimes there aren't.  Sometimes the headers have dates in US format or non-US
format that looks like US format and times in various miscellaneous timezones
making it really hard to tell which not very well defined section was posted
before which other not very well defined section.  Sometimes there are no dates
or times.

Then the list owner politely asks people to try to follow a particular
procedure and the response ranges from "I won't!" to "I can't!" to "Why should
I!" to "Look, I can be even more irritating if I really try harder!".

It appears that the main concern for some posters is "How can I get my crucially
important (to me) posting to the most recipients with the least effort on my
part?"  Would it not be nicer if we could all be more concerned with "How can I
make my posting as useful and easy to follow as possible for most recipients?"?

Maybe some people might prefer to be on a write-only mailing list?

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.


On 10/12/2015 12:28, Peter Coghlan wrote:
>> I'm not sure I understand what all this posting business is about.
>> The application (Thunderbird) puts the text where it wants.
>> In my case at the top. ie LIFO or latest first. It does the same with
>> the list of messages
>>
>> Decmail did this from its inception as did the IBM, HP.  etc mail systems.
>> I can't understand what the fuss is about. Please explain
>>
> The explaination in the signature in some of David Griffith's postings is about
> the best and most succinct I've seen.
>
> Regards,
> Peter Coghlan.