about posting a reply

Stupid question... bear with me!!! I don't think that I'm posting my
replies correctly. Should I hit reply and type what I want above? Or
below?
I do it different every time and sometimes there are so many posts its hard
to follow

 

This is a religious topic in some groups - it's best to follow the
convention of the group. The volume here seems low enough that the
pedants are busy elsewhere, so it doesn't really matter.

Most folks who care about it want "bottom posting", with the logic that
reading a single post one can see the flow of conversation.

For short notes, I bottom-post to save the grief. For longer,
multi-point posts, it reads better if you intersperse your comments and
cut out non-essential content from the prior post.

Cheers,
Richard

 

You have that right.

Agreed. Here, in this newsgroup, bottom posting or interspersed seems to
be the norm. In other groups, especially the Microsoft ones, you'll get
chewed out for bottom posting. In still other newsgroups, top posting will
garnish similar results. In the end, I just decided to do what seemed
natural - quoting what I'm replying to, with heavily editing to the key
point, and posting a response following that.

Stewart

 

Ditto. This seems to appease all parties.

The vocal detractors of bottom-posting usually gripe about having to
scroll through reams to find the reply; snipping fixes that problem.

Cheers,
Richard

 

How do you snip?? Are you just doing the copy and paste thing?? then typing
(snip) ??

 

Just "reply to group", highlight what you want to dump and delete. Some
people include a <snip>, only necessary IMO if the lack of what was
deleted might give a different meaning to what was quoted.

--
dadiOH
____________________________

dadiOH's dandies v3.06...
....a help file of info about MP3s, recording from
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Get it at http://mysite.verizon.net/xico

 

I don't care about top or bottom posting, so long as the responder
trims their attributed material. I hate getting an entire previous
message quoted back with a one-line "that's good info" response.

 

Set your newsreader to quote the previous message within the reply and
then edit what was quoted. I add "(snip)" to politely let others know I
edited the content. Once you get used to it, it only takes a few seconds to
edit a quote. The biggest advantage, in my opinion, is that it makes your
message much more readable, to the point, and therefore more effective.

Stewart

 

I now avoid the "<>" characters after discovering some HTML-based
newsreaders, such as those used for web pages, mistakenly interpret that as
HTML code. The characters I use, "()," are rarely interpreted wrong by any
newsreader.

Stewart

 

like that???

 

There are no rules. Do what feels comfortable to you. In other words,
develop your own style.

Stewart

 

I think I like it on top better... lol

 

To illustrate the issue at hand (why some people see this as
counter-intuitive and curse the day Microsoft made this behavior the
default in Outhouse Express)...

---- Cut here ----

Answer: After the quoted material

---- Cut here ----

Top-posting works when it's a simple reply to a simple thread. As the
threads get deeper, it becomes harder to maintain context if
everything is a mix of top- and bottom-posting and no-one bothers to
trim their attributions.

In the example above, you need to scroll through all of the quoted
material to attempt to find the question that's being answered on the
first line. Many times, that quoted material ends up being pages and
pages long because people can't figure out how to highlight-n-delete.

 

<http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_6.html>

<http://www.allmyfaqs.com/faq.pl?Top-posting_or_bottom-posting>

 

I don't care about top or bottom posting, so long as the responder
trims their attributed material. I hate getting an entire previous
message quoted back with a one-line "that's good info" response.
[/QUOTE]

I agree... thats why I asked. Especially once the post gets long.. it can
get annoying!

 

You agree, but then quoted the entire exchange.

Highlight and delete

Highlight and delete

Highlight and delete

Repeat until you get it.

Yeesh. You'd think you were using AOL.

 

Is that better?!?! I only left it all because it wasn't very long...geesh.
lol