I am on many email lists, and have been for several decades now--and
quite a few newsgroups before that.
This is one of the very few lists in which so many people complain
about "top posting."
The key, however, is "untrimmed" and not at all whether the message is
placed on top or on the bottom of the relevant material.
Personally, when someone trims the excess out, I actually prefer
adding the new message on top. That way, if I am familiar with the
thread, I needn't pay any attention to the "stuff" that occasioned the
comment to begin with.
Of course, some folks seem to get a severe case of "moderator-itis"
even if they are not the list owner or moderator. I have owned and
moderated lists many times over the years. One list I started and ran
for four years, for example, had over eighteen thousand members at its
peak and for about a year averaged over two hundred messages per day
on average. Since that list was a strictly local one, when I moved
from the area I passed list ownership to others. Last I looked,
it still has about seven thousand members. Today, I only moderate one
list and am an owner of one forum--which we moved from Yahoo Groups to
a free forum host some time back. (In some ways, in fact, a decent
forum is superior to a mail list like this one, as it makes it much
simpler for newcomers to find out what has been said about any given
topic previously.)
Somehow, I survived the top- and bottom-posting issue as a non-event,
and I suggest that a few of you folks just get over it. Express your
preferences, fine (as this one did), but don't be too upset if others
have different views and different practices.
Trimming posts of excess is something we should all be aware of,
though, even though all of us probably forget from time to time.
David
--- In LINUX_Newbies@
>
> Of course untrimmed top posted mail messages pollute the search space as
> well, because they leave irrelevant verbiage in the mail archives and
> mark googling far far less useful:-(
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