Re: HTML-format postings

[John Fraizer <nanog () Overkill EnterZone Net>]

On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Jonas Luster wrote:

> * Todd Suiter sez:
>
> It's not so much the people but the traffic. Top-Posting usually means
> Fullquote. Almost no top-poste I know bothers to shorten the content
> below his own $0.01. That said, let's just assume 10 top-posters with
> reasonably long texts in a row and you've got from 10 to 100 times
> more traffic than botton-postings. Multiply this by 1000 mailing list
> subscribers or some 10.000 Newsservers and you add quite some traffic
> to the 'net.
>                                                                     

While being guilty of being a top poster many times, I generally do prune
the text below.  I completely agree with you about people not pruning.  I
have a customer who for whatever reason can't remember to just send email
to noc@ and instead, finds the last email he sent to me and just top-posts
to it.  I've gotten a few that had messages months old appended to the
bottom. <g> 
>                                                                                              
> I always saw Top/Bottom as some kind of age- (netwise) and
> clue-indicator, the former being a sure sign of less than 3 years of
> netizenship.

I wouldn't consider this an acid test with respect to either.  I've been
connected since 1985 and still top-post at times.

> American cultures text is read from top to bottom, assuming timelines
> and question/response pairs associated with the flow of information we
> receive and process. Unless you're an avvid Jeopardy fan, you might
> see my point here, I guess.

There are times where your reply, although it contributes to the topic at
hand, may be much shorter than the message to which you are
responding.  If you're posting a two sentence response to a 2 page
dissertation that someone else posted in a thread, it is much less time
consuming for other readers to see your response and signature at the top
with the referenced post below.  I can't count how many times I've had to
scroll down 3 pages to see a response like "I agree. ---sig".

I guess this is a good reason to either not top-post or to at least prune
the information below your post to those points you're to which you're
responding.

> So, that makes three reasons not to Top-Post, one of which I consider
> important. Just think about it, and then let's see how you like your
> new life as a bottom-poster.

OK.  So, the lesson we've learned today is:

TOP POSTER = BOTTOM FEEDER?  ;-)


---
John Fraizer
EnterZone, Inc