In article t,
"John Busby" wrote:
If I am following a thread in a newsgroup, I prefer to read top posted
responses because as soon as you open the message, the latest response is
right in front of you, and you don't have to scroll down to the bottom of
the message to read it.

The problem is the nature of Usenet: there is no guarantee that the
message you will next read is the message following the last post you
read. Propagation delays mean that you could be reading a reply to
another posting. People who have short expire times on their Usenet
servers may not see the original question, or it may not yet have
propagated to that server. You have made the assumption that there is
'a' thread: the longer a discussion goes, the more likely that there
will be a number of threads with the same root thread. This thread has
already broken up into multiple threads.

Many people misunderstand the nature of Usenet and their newsreaders:
some assume that it is like a web forum and that messages remain fixed
in place and that others see the contents of a newsgroup as they do. I
have even seen people trying to refer to other postings as "The message
three up from this one", as if that makes any sense at all to anyone
other than them (and at that point in time, too).

I notice that you say "I prefer to read" and "as soon as you [i] open
the message". Usenet is not supposed to be about how everyone can cater
to a particular reader's preferences, but to act as an efficient method
of communicating one to many. This process is assisted by formatting
messages in a way that reaches as many people as possible in a concise,
clear and unambiguous manner. If you want your posting to be read and
understood by as many people as possible, then you must spend the time
writing in a way that make it worthwhile for the reader to spend the
time reading your posting. Spelling, punctuation, layout, and tone all
make a lasting impression on the reader. (This is not criticising any of
these in John's posting - otherwise I'd have sent an email - its a plea
to all of the posters out there.)

If I open a post and see four lines of text followed by a page of quoted
text, then my desire to even read that four lines of text is reduced,
since it shows a lack of courtesy in being not able to trim the material
on which you are basing your reply. The inclusion of this material must
be important, otherwise you would not have included it, right? And
therefore I need to read it to fully understand your response, right?
And so you are expecting me to read the text quoted below your response,
a post I may (or may not) have read, to understand your reply to this.
Well, I feel that it is lazy, and since I read many newsgroups and have
only a limited time to do so, asking me to try to work out how your
response relates to the following quoted text is not going to make me as
sympathetic to your post as it could be.

Quoting no text at all is roughly equivalent (in my opinion) since again
we have to do extra work to determine what the reply is in response to.

If you say "Well, I'm in a hurry, so I can't be expected to cut out all
the non-relevant lines" then you are asking us to do this work for you
when we read your posting: by top posting without trimming you are
telling us you have not bothered to spend time to write a careful and
considered opinion on some topic. I submit that the "Yeah, I agree!"
postings at the bottom of a slab of quoted text indicates that you
didn't spend any time thinking out your response - therefore the value
of your response is going to be quite low to me.

So, what do I do? Well I use a newsreader that allows me to easily
killfile people. If, as I find in some newsgroups, someone tends to post
a single line at the end of over a page of text, they get added to the
killfile for a time, usually two weeks. This is the extreme case though.
Life is too short to scroll down pages of quoted text to find "ROTFLMAO"
or "I agree", or indeed just to find a posting that just contains the
aforementioned single lines. Seeing it at the top of the posting has
saved me the scrolling, but leaves the same bad feeling in me about the
poster.

There are some cases where it *is* more appropriate to top post - such
as in emails where you might need to see the context to understand all
the issues. But, I don't get dozens of emails a day on the same topic
and would be just as annoyed by top posting in email if I had to read
the same number of emails as I manage to read of Usenet postings. Often,
emails have to be forwarded onto someone else, and this means they need
the context without having to be sent all the preceding emails and try
to work out the thread. That is not the case for Usenet.

Just because your newsreader (Microsoft's Outlook Express) puts the
cursor at the top of the quoted text does not make it right, any more
than arguing that PCs are meant to have viruses since Windows has so
many security flaws. In the early days of Usenet, many newsgroups
readers placed the cursor at the end of quoted text and even prevented
posting unless your added content exceeded the quoted text.

Some newsreaders allow you to thread postings by their Subject line,
some by Author, some by Reference. Threading by reference allows some
newsreaders to graphically show how a thread splits up. Good newsreaders
allow a reader to quickly read the posts they are interested in - the
text-based nature of Usenet makes it more information dense than forums
and Google Groups. But telling your audience to, "Get a better
newsreader", is going to alienate some of your audience - after all you
don't know what limitations they may have on using a better way of
reading your postings. Some people don't have a choice, and yet they
could be the people who have the information you want or be the people
you want reading your posts.

At the end of the day, it's about communication. If you can save one
reader a few seconds, then you have saved hundreds if not thousands the
same time - it all adds up. And they will thank you for it: not
necessarily by overt actions, but in the overall impression that your
postings make on them ("Win Friends and Influence People"). That is why
bottom posting after appropriate quoting has been found over the years
to be the best quoting method.

Bill Lee