TOP POSTING

[Rod Smallwood]

On 10/12/2015 13:27, Peter Coghlan wrote:
>> 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.
So I'll put it down here.

Hang on a mo if you do that you have to read all the messages backwards.
Scroll up from bottom read message down the page reading go back up through
the message and the next one then down that one. I'd call that snakes 
and ladders.

Messages are always read from top to bottom,
So whats required for a bunch of messages
together go to the last message.
Find the end of the list. Back up to the top of the previous message if 
you can find it.
Read the message and then add your comments after that.

Is that really what's required. Oh well so be it.

Rod