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Old June 23rd 04, 05:15 PM
Circuit Breaker
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On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 13:00:31 -0400, drceacphc wrote:

> thanks for the advice. greatly appreciate it.


Here's some more advice... and friendly advice, at that; I'm just wanting
to help. There are two points he snipping and replying

When most people reply on Usenet, they snip old text if it's not needed
anymore. In your case, just thanking me (or anyone else) for advice
doesn't typically need the old post quoted. It's mainly for archival
purposes; places like Google store these posts, so it's unlikely that
they'll get a hit on "thanks for the advice" that they wouldn't get on the
previous post anyway, so there's no need to include the previous post.

If, OTOH, you were carrying on a lengthy conversation, it's customary to
reply to certain parts of that conversation and then remove whatever
you're not replying to. When doing this, it's usually best to reply
beneath the text you're replying to. This is called "bottom-posting" if
your entire reply is at the end of the message, or "follow-posting" (IIRC)
if you reply to bits here and there throughout the message. The reasoning
behind this is for readability. Most people, when reading from google or
from a threaded reader (the kind where replies are branched off from the
parent article in the header pane), will see that it's a threaded article,
and if they have been following the thread, will just go to the first
unread article in that thread. That article would then be readable as
though a normal conversation were taking place.

If the respondents all top-posted (as you did here), then the reader would
have to start at the bottom paragraph, read it from top to bottom, then
skip /up/ to the reply, read it top to bottom, skip /up/ to the next....

As you can imagine, it would be much easier to read the thread if the
original post is on top, then the first reply immediately beneath it, then
that reply's reply beneath it, so forth... that way, the reader just
starts at the top and reads his/her way down, just like reading a book or
newspaper.

There are many people who refuse to do it simply because they think it's
stupid, a waste of time, or that others just need to fit in to their way
of thinking, but truth be told, all they have to do is hit
"CTRL-END" to get to the bottom of the post, so it's not really a
waste of time. Furthermore, it makes reading threads much easier
on those who have been here since the dawn of time itself. In that
same sense, why should anyone who's been here forever be required
to fit in to the new guy's way of thinking, eh?

Unfortunately, these came about largely from an improperly
configured/programmed newsreader that started their cursors at the top of
the post instead of the bottom, so they topposted by default. What they
didn't realize is that those people who had already been using Usenet for
years were bottom-posting. So basically, because one group of programmers
at a very large software company based out of Redmond didn't do a little
research and therefore misconfigured their product (which still is, BTW),
we now have two different groups of people posting two different ways. At
least, this is the story as I have read it told. It may have been some
other reason as to how topposting got started, but regardless, I think the
majority still bottom- or follow-post. I have no stats on this, however,
so I could be wrong.

Still, it's just friendly advice, take or leave.

Take care and best regards

CJ
--
THIS POST ORIGINATED FROM USENET, *NOT* ANY WEB-BASED FORUM! IF YOU ARE READING
IT FROM A WEB BROWSER SUCH AS INTERNET EXPLORER OR NETSCAPE, THEN YOU ARE NOT
READING THE ORIGINAL POST AND YOU SHOULD LEARN ABOUT "USENET" FROM
http://www.ibiblio.org/usenet-i/usenet-help.html

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