On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 18:27:54 GMT, Steve
wrote:

I'm new to this group (about a week). In other groups I follow, I've
seen people complain about posting the reply at the bottom. Their reason
was that when they read through a batch of posts in a thread, they don't
want to have to wade through the original post every time. They say post
at the top and anyone can look down to see what it was about if they
don't already know. I do it either way depending on the situation and my
mood.

I don't get excited about it anymore (God knows it's better
than posting with all the HTML codes!) and I certainly don't
go out of my way to object to top-posting, but since we're
discussing it, I'll chime in... ;-)

Reading through some of the URLs given below may help you
to understand *why* bottom posting is and always has been
the Usenet (newsgroup) standard and why many of us tend to
killfile consistent top-posters: their posts are just too
confusing to be worth bothering with.

I think this one

http://home.sprintmail.com/~dtrout/Usenet101.html

is especially useful and explains things very well.

Pat


Bottom vs. top posting and quotation style on Usenet
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/brox.html

Netiquette: "When thou enter a city, abide by its customs."
http://www.glowworms.com/~vez/neti.html

How To Followup A Post On Netnews Properly
http://www.star-one.org.uk/computer/format.htm

Usenet 101: How to properly format a Usenet post
http://home.sprintmail.com/~dtrout/Usenet101.html

How do I quote correctly in usenet?
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html

Posting help for newbies
http://www.windfalls.net/ukrm/postinghelp.html

Zen and the art of the internet (usenet section)
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_6.html

The seven don'ts of Usenet
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usenet/dont.html

Why bottom-posting is better than top-posting
http://fmf.fwn.rug.nl/~anton/topposting.html

What do you mean "my reply is upside-down"?
http://www.i-hate-computers.demon.co.uk/

The advantages of usenet's quoting conventions
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/g.mccaugha...ks/uquote.html

Rules for posting to Usenet
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/usenet/posting-rules/part1/

Why should I place my response below the quoted text?
http://allmyfaqs.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl...bottom-posting

Why you shouldn't ask for E-mail responses on Usenet
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/usene...responses.html

Quoting Style in Newsgroup Postings
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7ewijnands/nnq/nquote.html

Put an end to Outlook Express's messy quotes with this
automated fix!
http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/

For the Engineer/Programmer: News related RFCs and Drafts
http://www.tin.org/docs.html