Re: bottom / top posting - Mailing list pgsql-general

Dean Gibson (DB Administrator) said on Wed, 9 Jun 2021 14:41:47 -0700

>> On Mon, Jun  7, 2021 at 07:53:30PM +0200, Francisco Olarte wrote:
>>> ... properly scanning a top posted one takes much longer.
>
>Not here.

Depends on whether the top-poster reiterates nouns instead of just
using pronouns, and whether he/she identifies what is being responded
to. Most don't. Hence the frustration.

>
>>> I find top-posting moderately offensive, like saying "I am not
>>> going to waste time to make your reading experience better".
>
>Not here either.
>
>Top-posting has been the predominantly common practice in the business
>& government world for decades, & it is easy to adapt to. 

OF COURSE! In business you need the CYA of having the entire discussion
archived, and often the discussion is between two people. But a mailing
list is a mind-meld of tens or hundreds of people. Placing the response
directly below the text that prompted the response makes everything
crystal clear. But just one top-poster can blow up that whole clarity
for the remainder of the thread, making everything a data mine through
posts and guessing who meant what.



> Just like
>HTML eMail (within reason) & more than 80 columns on a line.  Somehow,
>millions of ordinary people are able to adapt to this,

in business contexts


> on very popular
>network eMail providers, like Google groups & groups.io, as well as
>their work environment.

Yeah, google, microsoft and the rest of the
big boys make it much easier to top post. If they made interleave
posting easier, you'd be arguing for that right now, in all contexts
except businss.

>I suppose it comes from the practice in those environs when paper
>memos were the norm, & if you needed to attach the contents of other
>paper memos to your own for context, you stapled them to the BACK of
>your own.
>
>Of course, wherever (top/bottom) one posts, trimming is important,

Thank you!

People see mile long emails and blame interleave or bottom posting, when
what's to blame is a failure to remove material not germane to the
current responses. Have you ever noticed these guys who write their
last line, then leave a couple thousand lines of previous stuff, not at
all apropos to the current post, so you have to read thru all that
stuff to make sure there's nothing else? This isn't about bottom
posting, it's about laziness and/or not understanding communication.

>it's far less important with top-posting.  You usually don't have to
>scroll down to get the immediate context,

:-) The top-posted emails you and I have read must be incredibly
different. I usually find top-posts require an archaeological dig
through layers of emails past.

[snip]

>
>But then, I was VERY successful in my software development career,
>consulting at about 30 companies (now retired).  Maybe working with
>others without conflict on silly issues, had something to do with it.

I find nothing silly about clarity or the lack thereof. Imagine the
problems a project could face because person A was too lazy to
interleave post, and person B was tolerant of it and didn't ask enough
"what do you mean by" questions.

>
>This message would normally have been top-posted, but was
>bottom-posted to avoid offending or irritating people here. Seriously.

Thanks! Your message was crystal clear and easy to respond to.

SteveT

Steve Litt
Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques