Top posting, one the biggest causes of friction on newsgroups?
This is one of the most contentious and misunderstood aspects of Usenet and Newsgroups. If someone has replied to one of your posts and included a link to this section, then please don’t take offence. Please read, and then decide how to respond.
What is top posting?
Top posting is when a post is replied to in a newsgroup by writing a reply on top of the original post instead of underneath (in the same way as you might do when replying to a private email)
Why do so many people do top posting?
It’s what most of us do with e-mails. It’s by far the best way to conduct a conversation when only two people are following the correspondence and it’s unlikely anyone else will ever need to read all the e-mails at a later date. It seems pretty logical to do the same on a newsgroup unless you know different.
Most new users who are unaware of how newsgroups work instinctively top post. This annoys many members who come across it every day from new users.
Many well intentioned people point top posters to a source that explains the rules. The “offender” may feel embarrassed or indignant and become defensive. Let’s face it, the rules aren’t in an obvious place, and no one told most of us when we signed up to an ISP that there are any rules at all. Instead of being grateful for being pointed in the right direction many people seem to become over defensive and even angry. Some seem to take up top posting as a method of showing how they won’t be told what to do, or just to annoy those “pompus” people who snapped at them.
Some people paint themselves into a corner by over reacting. They can then find it impossible to back down, even if they subsequently realise and accept the logic behind bottom posting.
What’s good about top posting?
Top posting is very quick and convenient. You just read a post, decide to add your views to it and send it off. The great thing is that anyone reading it will get your words straight away, at the top of the post and they’ll never have to scroll down to get to it either.
What’s not so good about top posting?
It is impossible to follow a thread where top posting has occurred because the order gets totally jumbled up. People trying to read the information in these posts will often want to (need to) follow how the conversation evolved. Answers come before questions, and once a few quotes are included it’s a total mess. Also, people who top post never edit the previous quoted post so the size of the post is often considerably larger than necessary.
Too much scrolling? Don’t blame top posting
Top posters often justify the practice by claiming that bottom posting causes people to have to scroll (often a couple of screen lengths) to read new material. This is especially frustrating when the new material turns out to be just one sentence or something as pointless as, “I agree”. The important thing to remember here is that this problem is not caused by bottom posting, but by a lack of editing (or snipping) by a bottom poster. This is another major problem, which has nothing to do with top posting at all.
To really appreciate why people object to top posting you have to remember that newsgroups are a public resource. Many of the news groups have a cliquey feel to them and it’s easy to get the impression that only a small number of people regularly use them. The truth is that people who only read, and never post anything (lurkers) are estimated to outnumber the active posters by anything from 10:1 to 100:1.
The majority of newsgroups are there for people to ask questions on a specialist subject, and get answers from people with greater knowledge. The posts made on news groups are archived for decades - maybe for ever - and will get served up by search engines for years to come as people seek knowledge on certain subjects. It’s the fact that the news groups are an archived resource for people that come after us (the next day or years later) that makes it the decent thing to do to try and allow others to be able to follow the threads.
Top posting doesn’t cause any major problems for the immediate few who may be participating in a discussion. For this reason, some informal news groups, that maybe just chat and have a laugh may even allow top posting.
Lot’s of people don’t like rules, and take great offence to anyone telling them what they can and can’t do. The fact is that you can do what you want. If you want to top post then you can - and no one can stop you. My only advice is to at least look into why these people get so high and mighty about it and then, if you still decide to top post, do so in the full knowledge that you are making it difficult for other people and accept the inevitable flack as a price to pay for your freedom of choice.
Written by Andy(ArT)Trigg on May 4th, 2008 with
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#1. May 14th, 2008, at 9:36 AM.
Hi.
Very interesting site!
Thanks!