[arch-general] top posting

[Aaron Griffin]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:36 AM, Patrick Burroughs
<celticmadman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 23:31, Juan Diego <juantascon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello listmates,
>>
>> is there any special reason of why top-posting is a bad thing?
>
> To be clichéd...
>
> A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
> Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
> A: Top-posting.
> Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

To explain this a bit more verbosely:

Top posting assumes that everyone reading the email is up-to-speed on
all the previous emails and remembers them all. It's used in office
situations where emails are fired off rapidly for every little thing.
The newly-added text is meant to be most important.

However, this is a mailing list. Not everyone is aware of the "state"
of the list at any given time. It's best to bottom post and only
reference relevant material so that even someone coming upon the 15th
email in a chain is able to read just that email and understand it for
the most part. If the 15th email just said "Yeah, that's a good idea"
then everyone is confused