Top-posting &c. (was Re: [ANNC] pybotwar-0.8)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 09:36:04 -0700, rusi wrote:

> I was in a corporate environment for a while.  And carried my
> 'trim&interleave' habits there.
> And got gently scolded for seeming to hide things!!

Corporate email users are generally incompetent at email no matter what 
email conventions you use. I cannot tell you the number of times I have 
emailed somebody, top-posted, explicitly said "We have three questions 
blocking progress, please answer all three", asked the three questions in 
clearly numbered bullet points... and got an answer back to the first and 
not even an acknowledgement of the other two.

Nevertheless, I've taken up writing at the top of emails

"My replies are interleaved with your questions which are shown starting 
with > symbols."

to make it obvious that they should keep reading.

It *is* possible to top-post and communicate effectively, it just takes a 
LOT more work, and the sorts of people who prefer top posting simply 
don't do it. Top-posting only works for shallow communication: simple 
questions, simple replies, and shallow threads, two or three replies at 
most. It's good for emails like:

    Subject: Meet you at the pub on Friday afternoon?

    See u there!!!

    --- Original Message ---

    Hey bro, want to catch up for drinks at the pub on Friday? 


but lousy for long *discussion* threads where people are replying to 
potentially dozens of separate issues within a single email.

To communicate effectively in email, you need to assume that your reader 
has forgotten the context of your reply, since they may have. They are 
probably dealing with dozens of other similar emails. A thread may go on 
for a week, or the question may have been asked a month ago and the reply 
only sent now. In long discussions, subjects may drift so that the 
subject line is no longer appropriate, or it may be a generic subject 
line.

In interleaved email, the quoted text acts as a refresher of previous 
content. If you don't interleave, you are responsible for adding context. 
Rather than:

"Sort the list first."

write something like:

"Your binary search is failing because the list is unsorted. Sort the 
list first."

That's a trivial example. In practice this becomes a PITA real fast, 
which is why top-posting discourages discussion in depth and encourages 
short, shallow, context-free replies.


> Just mentioning that there are cultures other than this one.

There are cultures that marry five year old girls to sixty year old men, 
cultures that treat throwing acid in the faces of women as acceptable 
behaviour, cultures that allow war heroes to die of hunger and cold 
homeless in the street, and cultures that top-post. What's your point?


> Of course, "Do in Rome as romans do" is universally sound advice, (with
> Rome suitably parameterized), so its best to follow the netiquette of
> the forum you are using.

Unless you think you can change the culture of Rome by example.


-- 
Steven