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[Tim]

Allegedly, on or about 20 February 2016, Ntlworld sent:
> Unless you live in cloud cuckoo land (academia?)! You surely cannot
> have faiked to notice that all business people Top
> post - which is why most mail clients are set to top post by default -
> its about time mailing lists did the same!! 

You miss the point, that you're supposed to participate in a list in the
manner that the list has told you to do so.  It's in the introductory
information, and the list members are telling you to do so, now.

In the business world, *you* are top posting because you're conforming
to *their* norm.  Have the courtesy to the same thing when you
participate in someone else's forum.

The real reason most people top-post elsewhere, is that they're
following an example already set for them, mostly by what happens when
they hit reply on their mail client.  Which, for the majority of them,
was that crappy thing written by Microsoft which was utterly crap at
quoting text without mangling the paragraph formatting if it ever tried
to re-wrap it.  So it simply quoted it below, verbatim.

While it *may* be convenient for *some* businesses for each message to
carry the entire dialogue, for the sake of keeping a record, it's not in
a convenient form to read (out-of-order, and usually badly mangled with
each new generation of the message).  And it's highly inappropriate for
a Q&A type of session, which is what this forum usually is.

i.e. When diagnosing a problem, it starts out with someone expressing a
problem, they get suggestions to try, and asked some questions to narrow
down the problem.  It's an awful lot easier to follow what's happened
when the answers are written along with each individual question, in
turn, and when everything else that doesn't need to be re-quoted gets
discarded.

And I see that even web forums are starting to see the light.  They're,
now, starting to condense quoting, to place newer messages below the
older ones, so that you can read a thread in sequence, and not have to
zig-zag up and down the page.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64

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posted to the mailing list.

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