On 2008-04-19, Travis Marlatte wrote:
Using a mouse wheel to scroll works pretty well.

Not when reading news in a text mode reader in a terminal window, it
doesn't.

I would rather have excessive quoting that requires a fraction of a second
to scroll past than excessive trimming that makes me unfilter read
articles, find the thread in the long list, re-find my position in the
thread and then find a post that has enough context to be useful.

Optimize for the common case. Out of how many articles do you have to do
this once?

Further, your newsreader almost certainly has a function to read the parent
of the article you're currently on. Try using that; it makes life a lot
simpler.

Email threads are typically top post oriented. That makes it much simpler,
doesn't it? The new text is right at the top and the rest is an easy scroll
away but easily ignored.

Just because Microsoft screwed this up is no reason to enshrine it in
practice.

It seems that the phylosophy to bottom post is causing the problem. Bottom
posting makes all the intermediate text get in the way and trimming becomes
the curtious thing to do. Just top post and leave it all there. When the
thread gets too long, it's probably time to move on to something else
anyway.

Top posting is evil because it totally divorces your response from what
you're responding to, thus destroying any context in your replies.

Do you have conversations backwards? Then why post that way?

I have been bottom posting and trimming just to go along with the vocal few
that seem to get all bent out of shape otherwise. After thinking about, I
think I'll start top posting.

There are a nonzero number of people who ignore those discourteous enough to
top post.
--
Jay Maynard, K5ZC http://www.conmicro.com
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Fairmont, MN (FRM) (Yes, that's me!)
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