Re: Re: Interestingly Enough.
By: Slink to Angus McLeod on Wed Jan 30 2008 22:30:00
> > 'Top-posting' is when you post your reply *above* the quoted text instead
> > of *below* (which is called, believe it or not, 'Bottom-posting'.
> >
> > On DOVE-Net, we bottom-post.
> Ahhhh.... I see.. seems like a silly rule...
It isn't a rule, it is a concention, which all follow for the sake of
consistency.
As for whether bottom-posting is silly or not, it depends on the way posts
get read.
Take the case of a personal e-mail. I send you an e-mail, and when you
reply, you can reasonably expect that I will remember substantially the
contents of the post I sent you a day or so go. So I can get right to
your reply. In this instance, top-posting is more common.
When I post on a BBS sub-board, things are different. First, I could be
posting several messages simultaneously, possibly even several to *you* on
separate matters, as dictated by ongoing threads. When I get your reply,
it helps if, as I read it, I can get a brief quote from my original (not
all 300 lines!) so I can 'place' the message in the flux of ongoing
threads that I am involved with at the time. So, reading from top to
bottom, and wanting to avoid a flip/flop technique of paging back and
forth, it helps if I encounter/read the brief quote first, with the
response following. (Your reply comes nearly a month after my post, so
without first seeing my post quoted, I wouldn't have known what your
simple "Ahhhh.... I see.. seems like a silly rule..." message was all
about. Had you top-posted, I'd have read your message, then realising it
made no sense, had to page forward to read the quote at the bottom to get
some context, then page back up to re-read your post again. By bottom-
posting, you made your message easier to read/understand.)
Also, you and I are not the only persons taking part. While your message
may be *nominally* to me, everyone else auditing the sub may be reading it
too. And people may join the sub a year from now, and read it then.
Since everyone can't be expected to remember exactly what everyone *else*
is talking about in every thread (especially if they have only just joined
the sub), the need to scan down through a few levels of brief, 'heads up'
quotations before reading the meat of the message increases.
For these reasons, BBS networks (certainly all those *I* have ever read)
prefer to employ bottom-posting.
---
Playing: "Amandrai" by "Ali Farka Toure" from the "Talking Timbuktu" album.
■ Synchronet ■ Oh God! It's HIM again..... The guy from The ANJO BBS!
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