[OT] TOP-POSTING

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 21 Jul 2006, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:

> Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> >
> > The etiquette for tech mailing lists is for the benefit of the
> > people providing free tech support not (directly) for the people
> > posting questions. Once it becomes clear someone asking for free
> > help doesn't care about my time, they aren't getting any more free
> > help.
> >
> I think that you have given one of the better explanations of why
> you should follow the list guidelines. You are free to ignore the
> list guidelines, but we are free to ignore your questions.

um ... no.  because if the poster in question is ignored en masse, you
*know* that, in short order, you'll be seeing a followup posting of
the form, "hey!  how come no one is answering my question!  huh?"

and for those people who are getting tired of seeing this thread come
up on a regular basis, there's a simple solution -- make it clear that
top-posting is not acceptable and be done with it.

this is ***not*** a debate we need to be having every month.  if you
desperately feel the need to express your creativity and individuality
by bucking the norms, here's some advice -- bugger off.  seriously.
if you just can't live without top posting, then start your own forum
or mailing list or what-have-you and go wild.  until that happens,
though, i think it's safe to say that most of us here are tired of
this discussion.  so don't top post.  just don't.  just like posting
in HTML is bad, so is top posting.  if you can't live with that,
there's the door.

rday

p.s  what particularly gripes my wagger are a number of the long-time
citizens of this list who should know better, but are instead
preaching tolerance and live and let live and that kind of rubbish.
that's not helping anyone.  all you're doing is giving the impression
that bad habits are acceptable.  so stop it.