From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se>
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2008 07:49:50 +0200 (CEST)

On Wed, 8 Oct 2008, Buddy Brannan wrote:

> I daresay the top posting has more useful content (even if it's lazy).

You mean as a general rule or in specific mails?

The bottom-posting "rule" is very wide-spread among open source-related
mailing lists, and other lists where "oldies" hang out. (I'm personally
subscribed to more than 100 mailing lists and only a small fraction of these
have mails with top-posted content) We who started this list always _assumed_
that every sensible person on the planet prefers bottom-posting until we were
proven wrong and then we had to document our preferred way.

It is good to have a rule for this, since I would say that there's one thing
that is worse than top-posting and that is *mixed* bottom and top posting.

Of course people may stuff great content in top-posted mails. We just ask them
to instead do the great content in inlined replies with trimmed quotes. As a
matter of fact, it isn't such a stupid idea that the single author of a mail
spends 20 seconds extra to make his mail easier to read as that then helps the
1,000 receivers of the mail and if they all gain 2 seconds each there's a
massive net gain.

> common courtesy would also ask that you call people's infractions out to
> them in private rather than publicly, which of course would bypass the whole
> issue of who on the list is being called out.

People tend to react this way on both public _and_ private "notices" about
failure to comply to rules so in all fairness Paul would get annoyed responses
either way. This way at least several people got reminded about this policy.

We have this debate at regular basis and having it again does not provide a
lot of good stuff. I'm convinced there's a majority of developers behind this
rule and I know several developers have already abandoned this list due to
these discussions/flame-wars. I will not continue this discusson this time
beyond this single reply. I'm one of the guys who wrote the netiquette rules,
I'm one of the guys who belives top-posting makes weird-looking and
hard-to-follow mails.

Now, let's get back to our actual topics.

I trust you guys have seen the recent great progress (with screenshots!) on
the Sansa v2 and Meizu fronts?

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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Received on 2008-10-08