Yeah. I was especially amused by the last question "Is there a better way? Yes, but apparently its bad".
Do people really stick new responses at the bottom of pages of text? I assumed in that case you were supposed to delete most of it.
It seems like the algorithm is something like "Are you responding to a specific part of a post? Then quote that and reply below. If not, post without extensive quoting (and delete everything else or leave it at the bottom)" And if you're on a message board where you're always supposed to do one or the other, then the other technique _is_ simply generating noise, and no-one bothers to make explicit the assumption in what sort of reply you should be making..
Back when Edinburgh Gamesoc communicated heavily by email (5--8 years ago now), there were sometimes arguments about top posting vs bottom posting. Discussions could get long, and people would routinely fail to cut anything out of previous messages, meaning that you would have a huge number of messages to read through, and would need to scroll through several screens worth of previous message in order to get to the actual response.
Having to do this repeatedly massively slowed down the rate at which you could read emails, and became really annoying -- especially when the bottom posters posted the top/bottom posting FAQ, and took great joy in failing to snip any of the previous text. We were not routinely being joined by new members, and there was no particular need to have this information repeated every single time. This deliberate antagonism against what seems to be a sensible system put me off bottom posting in emails for life.
Having said that, I tend to read forums much more these days, and top posting in a forum message just seems wrong. Some forums by default only quote one level (i.e. quotes of quotes get automatically cut), which seems quite sensible to me (you can add previous stuff in manually if you really need it). However, some don't do this, which seems pointless considering the same bit of information can end up being repeated multiple times on a single page due to repeated quoting in successive posts!
Agh. Being smug while deliberately making things harder to read seems worse than all the other solutions rolled together!
I agree it's pretty pointless on forums. If the messages will all be displayed together, the default should be nothing (if it's a reply to everything generally, or the comments are displayed as threaded), or headed by a snippet of the comment its replying to, or interleaved with a snippets its replying to in turn. And most forums I see DO follow this, the worst sin being people who unnessecarily quote a whole message to reply (bottom) to it, or a comment replying to something without clear attributiojn.
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Do people really stick new responses at the bottom of pages of text? I assumed in that case you were supposed to delete most of it.
It seems like the algorithm is something like "Are you responding to a specific part of a post? Then quote that and reply below. If not, post without extensive quoting (and delete everything else or leave it at the bottom)" And if you're on a message board where you're always supposed to do one or the other, then the other technique _is_ simply generating noise, and no-one bothers to make explicit the assumption in what sort of reply you should be making..
no subject
Having to do this repeatedly massively slowed down the rate at which you could read emails, and became really annoying -- especially when the bottom posters posted the top/bottom posting FAQ, and took great joy in failing to snip any of the previous text. We were not routinely being joined by new members, and there was no particular need to have this information repeated every single time. This deliberate antagonism against what seems to be a sensible system put me off bottom posting in emails for life.
Having said that, I tend to read forums much more these days, and top posting in a forum message just seems wrong. Some forums by default only quote one level (i.e. quotes of quotes get automatically cut), which seems quite sensible to me (you can add previous stuff in manually if you really need it). However, some don't do this, which seems pointless considering the same bit of information can end up being repeated multiple times on a single page due to repeated quoting in successive posts!
no subject
I agree it's pretty pointless on forums. If the messages will all be displayed together, the default should be nothing (if it's a reply to everything generally, or the comments are displayed as threaded), or headed by a snippet of the comment its replying to, or interleaved with a snippets its replying to in turn. And most forums I see DO follow this, the worst sin being people who unnessecarily quote a whole message to reply (bottom) to it, or a comment replying to something without clear attributiojn.