A: Top posters
Q: Who are the most annoying people on the internet.

V G wrote:
> Is top posting allowed on the list?

Unfortunately yes, but that doesn't make it a good idea or less obnoxious.
It will be a real laugh to see how many people top-post their replies to
your message.  Perhaps you can ask them if mommy knows they're playing with
the 'puter again.

There will always be people who think they are so important that a extra
second on their end properly quoting, trimming, and replying to a post is
worth the aggrevation of 2000 other people that end up reading it.  Or
they're just lazy or dumb.

> Also, since so many people don't like it, why do most clients do it by
> default, and it's not an option in many, either.

Think about what the default should be if you wanted to encourage proper
posting and trimming.  If you put the cusor at the bottom the lazy people
wouldn't trim and you'd get the same thing in forwards instead of reverse
order.  That would be better for short posts, but worse after several layer=
s
of untrimmed replies.

If you do want to do it right, then cursor at top is the best default.  Tha=
t
way you can work your way down the message, trim what you don't need for
context, and insert replies to the points as they are made.

Are there really any mailers that don't let you chose where to put your
reply?  I find that hard to believe.  Typically, once you do a reply some
sort of edit window comes up that may have the replied-to text seeded in it=
,
but it's still a edit window you can delete and add things to.

If I was creating a list server, I'd have it add a single footer line to
every post, then refuse replies that contain the footer line in the reply.
Or maybe it would just reject posts that ended in quoted text.  There is
really no excuse for that.

This is all self-evident, but unfortunately the world is full of dumb and
lazy people (who I'm sure will announce themselves by top-posting their
reply to your message, just watch).  So once again, if you want your email
post to be readable by the widest possible audience with the least total
aggrevation:

  1 - Use ASCII PLAIN TEXT.  No fancy encodings, quoted printable,
      base64, etc.  Don't even think about HTML encoding.

  2 - Make sure your lines don't exceed 80 characters.

  3 - TRIM the parts of a message you are not directly replying to or
      that aren't necessary to supply context for what you are saying.

  4 - Add your replies in-line after whatever points you are replying
      to.  If this were a interactive conversation, this is where you'd
      alternate speaking.  Email lists are slower and more batch
      oriented, so each message represents a chunk of back and forth
      conversation.

And now we'll get the usual people crawling out from the corners saying "bu=
t
RFCxxxxx says...".  That of course is not the point.  It not about what all
email software is supposed to do according some standard, but what actually
goes on out there.  We're talking about what to do to maximize the
effectiveness of your message, not about writing email software.


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