Christofer C. Bell wrote:
To be honest, no one really cares if you top post or not, but it only takes a moment to ridicule someone over the Internet. Some folks need the self-esteem boost of making fun of a top-poster.
Especially technical types like things to make sense. Inline replies make a lot of sense, since one can reply to individual remarks without establishing context in your reply. It saves a lot of typing.
"bottom-posting" works about as well, as long as you trim the message to which you're replying appropriately.
"top-posting" is just ridiculous. The context of the reply is all below the reply itself, which makes it difficult to follow, logically. A reader needs to scroll down, read the original message for context, then scroll up to read the reply. In a mailing list, where subscribers probably have the archives to look at, you might as well trim the reply out entirely as top-post.
By far the worst, situation, though, is mixing reply styles. If context is *all over the place*, it becomes extremely tedious to scroll around and figure out who's replying to what, where. Since top-posting will almost always create this situation, COURTEOUS members discourage it.
Courtesy is the name of the game. Make it easy for people to help you.
