Hi Internals, Could we drop the bottom-posting rule?
Almost all new contributors fall into this trap and reply to a thread by top-posting, only to get chastised by someone else on the list. It's really difficult to remember to delete the default reply. Mail clients don't make it easy for us; it's hidden by default. Bottom-posting makes reading the thread much more difficult too. The actual reply gets lost in between the quoted content. I often get confused about what is new and what was quoted. Many modern clients are designed to handle top-posting and don't handle bottom-posting well. People are usually used to it and they read from top to bottom. I don't know if in the past some mail clients defaulted to bottom-posting but right now it just seems like an unnecessary annoyance. If you want to quote someone then it makes sense to copy a part of the message and then add a reply below, but forcing people to remove the default reply from the mail client and then add the whole previous message on top of your own reply isn't very productive. It wastes time and screen space. Could we please change this rule or at least stop enforcing it? Do people actually have mail clients that don't automatically hide the previous conversation? If not, then I think we can let people top-post. Regards, Kamil
