[GLLUG] OT: Top posting/Bottom posting

[Edward Glowacki]

On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 16:53, Brian Hoort wrote:
> Someone has kindly pointed out that I mis-typed -- I indeed prefer 
> "top-posting".

I prefer to put my replies in the middle, right after the text they are
relevant to.  In my eyes, the fact that this particular paragraph is
only 3-4 lines from the top qualifies it as top-posting as well. =)

> More than the top/bottom debate, I appreciate it when someone takes the 
> 7/10 ths of a second it takes to clean up a message, leaving the most 
> relevant parts.  

Oh my, yes!  That alone would probably save most of this debate!  If you
chopped out the "bad" stuff, you can move the "good" stuff that much
closer to the top of the message.

> Perhaps this needs to be split off into another 
> thread?  He ha!

Normally I would silently delete those 2 lines... ;)

> 
> At 03:22 PM 9/22/2003, Brian Hoort wrote:
> >I'll say I prefer "bottom-posting".
> 
> _______________________________________________
> linux-user mailing list
> linux-user at egr.msu.edu
> http://www.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user

This stuff would go to.  We don't need another copy of the list footer,
and the double-quoted line isn't relevant anymore really.


Basically my rules of messaging go something like this:

1. Clean out the message and only quote what you need.
2. Reply inline ("middle posting") 
3. Break apart long paragraphs so replies are near the part of the
original message they are relevant to.
4. If there is more than a paragraph quoted at the top, I probably
haven't done a good job cleaning and breaking, but sometimes that's OK. 
Maybe add a quick intro sentence at the beginning in this case.
5. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation should be decent.

I'm sure there are other rules I use, I just can't think of them now...
=)

-ED

-- 
Edward Glowacki			glowack2 at msu.edu
A PBS mind in an MTV world. 
	-- Author unknown