News Group Use

Bottom is the bottom line. We read left to right ad top do bottom. If someone replies to my reply and puts their reply at the top it makes it impossible to determine what the thread is. Mouse wit the scroll wheel is really cheap.

Regards,

Boris Mohar

Got Knock? - see: Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs

I usually reply at the bottom, with exceptions. A top posting sometimes seems best when it is one of several responses, and I think everyone on the group who cares has already read the original. Sometimes I put a response in the middle, where I'm commenting on something specific within the original message.

There is nobody who can decide what is "correct" on this matter. I used to enjoy reading a newsgroup, but the insistence of a few individuals on how and where to post a comment drove me away. I think the substance of the response is what matters.

And then there are folks who enoy correcting spelling errors in postings.

Bottom replies used to be normal, back in the earlier days when everbody had tin and elm newsreaders. Then Microsoft came along and did pretty much everything a different way, including Outlook (and the express version) that defaults to top replies.

Microsoft is like the General Motors of the computer world- good at sellling a lot of their product, and even turning out some good products, but mainly turning out a whole lot of mediocre products. Back on topic, I haven't got it figured out who is analogous to Volvo :)

It's a matter of religion.

Many people, particularly Usenet old-timers, prefer "bottom posting", where new text goes below quoted text. Actually, we generally prefer interleaved posting with snipping: the author of the new message quotes as much as is necessary to establish context (taking into account the nature of Usenet, which delivers messages in no particular order, so you don't know which of your readers will have seen the message you're quoting), inserts his or her comment, quotes the next relevant bit, inserts comment, and so forth.

Note that both aspects - quoting before replying and snipping - are important. Snipping reduces message length (there are still many Usenet participants on slow and/or expensive links) and makes messages more convenient to read. It also highlights what portions of the quoted message you're referring to.

This convention is sufficiently widespread that several newsreaders of pre-AOL vintage had "skip quoted material" commands - you'd hit a key and the reader would scroll to the first line that wasn't a quotation.

Common belief has it that Microsoft Outlook was responsible for popularizing top posting as an alternative reply style. I believe there was some debate on that question the last time this came up in alt.folklore.computers, but certainly Outlook, and the Microsoft newsgroups, contributed to the practice.

When Henry Spencer wrote "Son of 1036", a draft for a replacement for RFC 1036 (the Netnews specification), he included a recommendation for snipping. He didn't specifically endorse bottom-posting, but it's implied in some of the other comments (eg support for "skip quoted material" function).

Son of 1036 never did make it to RFC status. Recently, however, Charles Lindsey (et al) have promulgated a new set of IETF drafts for updating 1036, however, and one of them, the "Usenet Best Practice" draft, is similar in many ways to Son of 1036.[1]

I would say that's sufficient to conclude that the people most interested in Usenet style and convention - the ones who are actually going to the trouble to write standards drafts - advocate snipping quoted material and flagging what remains with the ">" character in the left margin. And they appear to lean toward bottom posting; while they don't attempt to explicitly require or recommend it, the other quotation guidelines make more sense for bottom-posted (possibly interleaved) style.

1. formatting link