O.T. Actual airline pilot conversations

"PJ Hunt" wrote:

If I understand this correctly then your previous messages was a 'top
post', as is the one I'm sending right now. Is that correct? [...]

Indeed.

I'll stick to this type of posting unless someone can explain why it's
better to repost the entire message at the top of my reply.

PJ,

your message nicely points to the core of the argument. In general, top-
posting reverses the normal flow of a (usenet) discussion and thus should
be avoided whenever possible. However if people cannot be bothered to trim
the quoted message down to the essential parts, then sifting through (long)
bottom-posts becomes even more annoying than reading top-posts.

Greetings,
Markus

On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 12:18:12 GMT, James Robinson
wrote:

ShawnD2112 wrote:

I've never understood why top posting is seen as such an evil thing.
What am I missing?

Two reasons:

smip

Two, top posters often quote the entire text below their reply without
editing it. That makes the replies longer than they need to be. You
often see a one line "me too" post, followed by several hundred lines of
quote. Bottom posters seem to be more into the habit of quoting only
what is necessary to retain continuity, so it keeps the length of the
posts under control.

Dreamer.

Darrel Toepfer wrote:
Morgans wrote:
ShawnD2112 wrote:

Can I change that default?

Nope

Crossposts to: rec.radio.scanner & misc.consumers removed, as I
don't post there...

The fact that *you* "don't post there" is quite irrelevant to the
wisdom or otherwise of removing the crossposts.

In this specific case, you seem to have been addressing Morgans and
ShawnD2112 in particular. Therefore your article should be posted
to *at least* one NG frequented by *each* of them. (As it happens,
I *think* that both frequent r.a.p.)

By all means trim spurious crossposts, but consider carefully which
NGs any individual "target readers" (such as Morgans and ShawnD2112)
are likely to follow.

On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 21:14:55 -0900, "PJ Hunt"
wrote:


I'll stick to this type of posting unless someone can explain why it's
better to repost the entire message at the top of my reply.

That's fine - a lot of us won't see it anyway.

Thank you for that well thought out informative response to my post.

PJ

============================================
Here's to the duck who swam a lake and never lost a feather,
May sometime another year, we all be back together.
JJW
============================================


"Bob Ward" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 21:14:55 -0900, "PJ Hunt"
wrote:


I'll stick to this type of posting unless someone can explain why it's
better to repost the entire message at the top of my reply.

That's fine - a lot of us won't see it anyway.

[Previous text and attributions tidied somewhat, but sequence
deliberately retained]

PJ Hunt wrote:

Thank you for that well thought out informative response to my post.

Bob Ward wrote:
PJ Hunt wrote:

I'll stick to this type of posting unless someone can explain why
it's better to repost the entire message at the top of my reply.

That's fine - a lot of us won't see it anyway.

Do you see what has happened here?

Simplifying somewhat, the structure is something like:

Comment 2

Original text

Comment 1

Yuck!

It is clearly preferable to maintain a *consistent* pattern, either
*always* placing new text before old ("top-posting"), or *always*
placing new text after old ("bottom-posting").

For *very good* historical reasons, the convention on Usenet is to
place new text *after* the old text on which you are commenting,
snipping out *surplus* old text and, when commenting on a number of
fragments, placing each comment immediately after the relevant bit
of the old text.

This way, reading an article from top to bottom should make sense
in a question-and-answer kind of way. Readers who are sufficiently
familiar with the thread can skip over the quoted text, but it will
generally be available for reference simply by looking a little way
up the screen, rather as one sometimes looks back at the previous
paragraph in a book.

*One* of the reasons for quoting and commenting in this way is that
Usenet articles are *not* guaranteed to arrive at a newsserver in
the "correct" order - heck, they are not *guaranteed* to arrive at
all - and propagation delays can be quite substantial: Google take
their time even now, and once upon a time delays measured in *days*
were common.

In the early days of Usenet, *slow* and *expensive* net connections
were very common, which made snipping out excess quoted material a
Very Good Thing. Things aren't *as bad* these days, but some users
are still on slowish connections where extra bytes cost extra bucks,
so good snippage is still very good practice.

Usenet and email are two *very* different media: Usenet is a form of
*broadcast* medium where readers often find themselves dealing with
fragments of *many* threads at once; email is basically a one-to-one
medium (yes, spammers abuse it as a broadcast medium) in which you
can be far more certain that your correspondent is already familiar
with the topic of your reply, so that *appending* the previous text
for reference makes more sense. That said, interleaving old and new
text in email responses can be very useful - particularly where the
discussion *is* a series of questions and answers.

This is a bit longer than I had anticipated, but I hope you can now
see why "bottom-posting" is conventional on Usenet.

Actually, "bottom-posting" is conventional on Usenet only among people who
say "bottom-posting" is conventional on Usenet.

Most everyone else top-posts. If you are reading a top-posted thread, you
open a message, read the top few lines, then move to the next message, no
scrolling to the bottom required.

Much more convenient...


"Robert Briggs" wrote in message
...
[Previous text and attributions tidied somewhat, but sequence
deliberately retained]

PJ Hunt wrote:

Thank you for that well thought out informative response to my post.

Bob Ward wrote:
PJ Hunt wrote:

I'll stick to this type of posting unless someone can explain why
it's better to repost the entire message at the top of my reply.

That's fine - a lot of us won't see it anyway.

Do you see what has happened here?

Simplifying somewhat, the structure is something like:

Comment 2

Original text

Comment 1

Yuck!

It is clearly preferable to maintain a *consistent* pattern, either
*always* placing new text before old ("top-posting"), or *always*
placing new text after old ("bottom-posting").

For *very good* historical reasons, the convention on Usenet is to
place new text *after* the old text on which you are commenting,
snipping out *surplus* old text and, when commenting on a number of
fragments, placing each comment immediately after the relevant bit
of the old text.

This way, reading an article from top to bottom should make sense
in a question-and-answer kind of way. Readers who are sufficiently
familiar with the thread can skip over the quoted text, but it will
generally be available for reference simply by looking a little way
up the screen, rather as one sometimes looks back at the previous
paragraph in a book.

*One* of the reasons for quoting and commenting in this way is that
Usenet articles are *not* guaranteed to arrive at a newsserver in
the "correct" order - heck, they are not *guaranteed* to arrive at
all - and propagation delays can be quite substantial: Google take
their time even now, and once upon a time delays measured in *days*
were common.

In the early days of Usenet, *slow* and *expensive* net connections
were very common, which made snipping out excess quoted material a
Very Good Thing. Things aren't *as bad* these days, but some users
are still on slowish connections where extra bytes cost extra bucks,
so good snippage is still very good practice.

Usenet and email are two *very* different media: Usenet is a form of
*broadcast* medium where readers often find themselves dealing with
fragments of *many* threads at once; email is basically a one-to-one
medium (yes, spammers abuse it as a broadcast medium) in which you
can be far more certain that your correspondent is already familiar
with the topic of your reply, so that *appending* the previous text
for reference makes more sense. That said, interleaving old and new
text in email responses can be very useful - particularly where the
discussion *is* a series of questions and answers.

This is a bit longer than I had anticipated, but I hope you can now
see why "bottom-posting" is conventional on Usenet.

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 14:23:29 -0600, "Bill Denton"
proclaimed:
Actually, "bottom-posting" is conventional on Usenet only among people who
say "bottom-posting" is conventional on Usenet.

Most everyone else top-posts. If you are reading a top-posted thread, you
open a message, read the top few lines, then move to the next message, no
scrolling to the bottom required.

Much more convenient...


Answer: Because it disrupts the flow of thought.
Question: Why is top posting such a pain in the ass?

It's just like paper files.

Most people who don't have time to waste post the latest document on
top.

Those who have nothing better to do with their time open the fastener,
take out all the documents, put the latest on the bottom and then
replace all the previous ones so that everything is in sequence. It
keeps them happy and occupied!

Dave,



Bill Denton wrote:

Actually, "bottom-posting" is conventional on Usenet only among people who
say "bottom-posting" is conventional on Usenet.

Most everyone else top-posts. If you are reading a top-posted thread, you
open a message, read the top few lines, then move to the next message, no
scrolling to the bottom required.

Much more convenient...

"Robert Briggs" wrote in message
...
[Previous text and attributions tidied somewhat, but sequence
deliberately retained]

PJ Hunt wrote:

Thank you for that well thought out informative response to my post.

Bob Ward wrote:
PJ Hunt wrote:

I'll stick to this type of posting unless someone can explain why
it's better to repost the entire message at the top of my reply.

That's fine - a lot of us won't see it anyway.

Do you see what has happened here?

Simplifying somewhat, the structure is something like:

Comment 2

Original text

Comment 1

Yuck!

It is clearly preferable to maintain a *consistent* pattern, either
*always* placing new text before old ("top-posting"), or *always*
placing new text after old ("bottom-posting").

For *very good* historical reasons, the convention on Usenet is to
place new text *after* the old text on which you are commenting,
snipping out *surplus* old text and, when commenting on a number of
fragments, placing each comment immediately after the relevant bit
of the old text.

This way, reading an article from top to bottom should make sense
in a question-and-answer kind of way. Readers who are sufficiently
familiar with the thread can skip over the quoted text, but it will
generally be available for reference simply by looking a little way
up the screen, rather as one sometimes looks back at the previous
paragraph in a book.

*One* of the reasons for quoting and commenting in this way is that
Usenet articles are *not* guaranteed to arrive at a newsserver in
the "correct" order - heck, they are not *guaranteed* to arrive at
all - and propagation delays can be quite substantial: Google take
their time even now, and once upon a time delays measured in *days*
were common.

In the early days of Usenet, *slow* and *expensive* net connections
were very common, which made snipping out excess quoted material a
Very Good Thing. Things aren't *as bad* these days, but some users
are still on slowish connections where extra bytes cost extra bucks,
so good snippage is still very good practice.

Usenet and email are two *very* different media: Usenet is a form of
*broadcast* medium where readers often find themselves dealing with
fragments of *many* threads at once; email is basically a one-to-one
medium (yes, spammers abuse it as a broadcast medium) in which you
can be far more certain that your correspondent is already familiar
with the topic of your reply, so that *appending* the previous text
for reference makes more sense. That said, interleaving old and new
text in email responses can be very useful - particularly where the
discussion *is* a series of questions and answers.

This is a bit longer than I had anticipated, but I hope you can now
see why "bottom-posting" is conventional on Usenet.

Thus said "PJ Hunt" :
I'll stick to this type of posting unless someone can explain why it's
better to repost the entire message at the top of my reply.

It isn't. If you're too lazy to edit the quoted content to include just
the relevant portions that you're replying to, then by all means don't
bottom post.

You could top-post, but better still, just don't post at all. There
are plenty of other posters who value the reader's time enough to edit
properly.