Tim Blair

Top vs. Bottom Posting (09/07/2004)

I know it's been covered a million times before (well, 240,000 according to Google, but it's still something that gets on my nerves, and today the question was rasied:

"Does anyone know the positives or negatives of top vs bottom posting?"

Conventional netiquette (i.e. from usenet) says that "thou shalt bottom-post, and thou shalt quote only that which needs quoting". Or something similar.

For those interested (or not), "top posting" is generally what most people do - hit the reply button, type their reply above the quoted message and hit send. This is generally seen as "breaking the flow of conversation" in the fact that to understand what the reply is about, you need to read the bit below it first.

Another problem with people top posting is that you generally end up with multiple copies of a signature (especially apparent in things like Yahoo! group messages which dump half a ton of advertising at the bottom) - there really is no need to make people download 40k of text when the only useful bit is the first two lines at the top. And following a whole conversation amidst all these ads and signatures is a nightmare.

Of course, bottom posting (writing your reply below the original message) doesn't automatically solve these issues because you could just as well leave in all signature information, but people _usually_ delete all that because otherwise they can't see what they're replying to.

With regards to quoting previous messages (not exactly to do with the top/bottom posting debate but very close to it) you should only quote what you need to, trimming anything that's not required. For example, if you're answering a particular question someone has posted, trim the quote down to just that (usually leaving the "So and so said..." bit at the top).

The idea is that, even if you've not read the original message, the quoted portions provide just enough information to let you know what the writer is responding to, and no more. If you're replying to multiple parts of a message, split the quote into separate bits so you're only "answering" one question at a time.

Oh the joys of being a net-geek...

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