On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 09:38:35PM +0100, Alexander Huemer wrote: > P.S. I passionately hate people who top-post, don't give enough > details and cannot say hi or bye in an email.
Well, this escalated quickly. Let's forget about this hi or bye thing. Top-posting though completely ruins a conversation on a mailing list. It's impossible to properly quote more than one past email of a thread. I do not understand why people do this. It makes me angry, because it shows very little respect for the communication partners on the mailing list. I have the expression that people who top-post never spend a single second thinking about the implications of their doings, no matter how many emails they write and read (and that can be thousands) where they could notice that _their_ doings ruined the quoting that other people tried to do. Top-posting is in the same category of doing as: - parking over two parking lots - not using the blinker - this [1] The common property of these doings is that the positive impact on the doer is very little and the negative impact on the receiver of the doing is big. Top posting saves 1..2 keystrokes in a decent MUA with a terrible effect on the whole mailing list and also for the person who has made the decision to top-post itself! This person itself is unable to properly reconstruct what happened in a thread from looking at a single email. The only possible conclusion I can draw is that top-posters aren't very clever. This would not bother me if this wouldn't steal time from all the people on all the mailing lists who try to help. For free (as in beer). I won't say anything about lack of details I initially criticized, because this email is already so long that many people already stopped before reaching this point. Kind regards, -Alex [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reihe_Einkaufswagen.JPG
