[bf1942] Useless comments

[ScratchMonkey]

--On Saturday, July 16, 2005 4:24 PM -0600 David Stevens 
<dave at netdefense.ca> wrote:

> I sort of agree with the 50 line "quotes"  however this USED to be a large
> problem when we were stuck with 14.4 modems and such..  in the days of DSL
> and Cable, it doesn't pose a problem at all.
>
> Why do you have an issue with it?

There are those who think that the alternative to top-posting is 
bottom-posting (interleaved-posting is the desirable one) and append a 
"me-too" to the end of the huge previous post. PITA to scroll down past 
what I just read to see that. And then that scrolling is used to justify 
top-posting. With proper trimming, interleaved posting works just fine. No 
scrolling required, at least for the first response point.

Top-posting is impossible to respond to point-by-point in a sensible way. I 
get an email with a run of questions and to top-post-respond I need to 
reproduce the whole mail, answer point by point interleaved, then quote the 
original in its entirety below. How else would one know which point I was 
responding to? Instead of saving an ever-growing message, why not just save 
the originals and let the client do the threading? Unless, of course, you 
have a brain-dead client that can't filter all related messages to a 
separate folder and can't display them threaded.

When posting to a mutual-support mailing list, your first objective is to 
make your post easy to parse and answer by the most qualified user on that 
list. But that user likely is also the busiest, with the least time to 
figure out what your message is saying. Laziness on the part of the 
composer is a good way of getting your question ignored by the people most 
qualified to answer it. Interleaved posting and aggressive trimming is an 
effective way of making a message more readable and more attractive to your 
audience.