Re: top posting

John D. Burger wrote:
> Thomas Hart wrote:
>
>> I agree. Obviously there is convention, and I will post in the style
>> generally accepted in the list, but to me it always made more sense
>> to top post. If you're keeping up on the conversation, then the
>> relevant information is right there, and if you weren't, it's not
>> that difficult to go through and catch up (it's not like the lines
>> are in reverse order, or the words spelled backwards or something).
>
> You write "conversation" as if every message is written as a measured
> response to all of the previous messages, with an absolute order
> defined by when the messages arrive in my inbox, like we're all
> carefully taking turns.  This is simply not true, especially when a
> thread has many participants, with many messages flying past each
> other - effectively, there are =many= interwoven conversations going
> on.  Quoting the text to which you are responding is often the only
> way to provide the necessary specific context for your comments.
>
> As an illustration, which helps you understand the preceding paragraph
> better, the extract above, or the mess below?
>
> - John D. Burger
>   MITRE
You don't want my honest answer, which is why you asked me a biased
question. As I was stating, I agree with the convention and the
communities wishes, and will attempt to follow them as a show of respect
for the time spent helping me solve real problems, not this netiquette
nonsense. You'll notice every post where I defend top posting is still
bottom posted.

However in the example above, I skipped everything above your response
and read what you had to say. I knew exactly what you were talking
about, and as a refresher on the conversation, I read the "mess" below.
However I'm not holding out on convincing everybody on the list that top
posting is better, just like I'm not trying to get everyone on the list
to agree on a pizza topping. The community has stated over and over
again that they prefer bottom posting, or pepperoni if you will. If I'm
getting free pizza from somebody who's not getting paid for it, I'll
take pepperoni, even if I prefer pineapple, because that's respectful.

You raise some good points, and I agree with them. However if you want
to have an intelligent conversation, try not to load it with questions
like "Do you prefer the good x above, or the bad x below?". There's a
simple unbiased way to ask me my opinion, but you weren't interested in
that, which is why I know you're not interested in my opinion, which is
why I should have top posted this entire response, but as I said, that's
disrespectful to the people who have helped me.

Once again, way too much time has been spent on this topic. It's very
simple (and this is coming from a top poster).

* The community wants you to bottom-post or interleave, no top posting.
Don't do it.
* The only reason you're here is to ask for help from people that are
smarter and more talented than you. Don't disrespect them.
* The only reason they're here is because they're awesome. Don't doubt it.

If you skipped this whole post, and only read the points above and this
line, you're my hero.

Why don't we get away from this whole conversation? It's not productive,
and it's not going to change anything, and the archives have .001% more
random useless bs. We should all donate to pgsql for having to store
this utter crap on their servers. To anybody who hasn't gotten a
response on a legitimate issue, I apologize for being petty and
opinionated and wasting your time.