Don't Read - Testing

[Matt Garrish]

I dont understand the mistake i made with top-posting, i dont even know what
that is.

Writing your responses at the top of your message. If you look above my
reply you can see who I'm replying to and why. If I were to post on top, you
would have to scroll down through the previous messages to figure out what
I'm talking about. It is also expected that the poster will trim off the
excess parts of the previous message(s) so that it is clear what
specifically is being responded to.

Don't think of posting to Usenet as being akin to writing an email to
someone. Emailers hate it when others intersperse comments in their messages
because it makes following the train of logic more difficult (i.e., it's
usually a conversation between two people, so you know what you're both
talking about). When you post to a technical group, you're usually looking
for an answer, and so people will break down your original message and
comment on the questions you have. If you have follow-up comments or
questions, it only makes sense to keep the pattern going and ask your new
question under whatever part of the reply you have in doubt.

It also provides context for other people to join in the discussion if they
haven't been following from the start. If you're top-posting your responses,
however, most people who haven't been involved from your original post won't
bother to scroll down and read the messages in the thread below to figure
out what's going on. It requires more work to do, so most people will take
the lazy route and just skip your email entirely. If you don't mind that few
people respond to your messages, there's nothing stopping you from
top-posting, but if you want to get the most out of a group it's best to
adhere by certain guidelines of usenetiquette.

Matt

 

[Malcolm Dew-Jones]

Alquemius ([email protected]) wrote:
: once again i am sorry.

: This is a new world for me,

: I dont understand the mistake i made with top-posting, i dont even know what
: that is.

Do I smell a troll around here somewhere?

 

[Tad McClellan]

I am sorry for that HUGE mistake i have commited.

I am pretty sure that you are not.

and i needed to do it in the channel i was intending to use.

Why do you think that you needed to do it in the channel you
were intending to use?

If it works in a *.test.* newsgroup, it'll work in other newsgroups.

the main
subject of every mail i post

mail does not go to Usenet newsgroups.

This is not email.

will be Perl Programming

Too late I'm afraid, the killfile entries have already been made.

Once again... sorry.

Yeah right.

 

[Daniel R. Tobias]

Don't think of posting to Usenet as being akin to writing an email to
someone. Emailers hate it when others intersperse comments in their messages
because it makes following the train of logic more difficult (i.e., it's
usually a conversation between two people, so you know what you're both
talking about).

I, for one, have always used the same interleaved reply style for
e-mail as I have for newsgroups; mailing lists, Web forums, and (back
when I still used them) dialup BBS discussion areas merited the same
approach.

My comments on reply quoting style:
http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

I can't agree. I have several colleagues whose routine email style
consists of a brief comment plonked on top of 500 lines of the
previous fortnight's discussion which, one can immediately sense from
the comment, they haven't bothered to read in any detail, let alone
actually comprehend. I parse that as a double discourtesy.

I, for one, have always used the same interleaved reply style for
e-mail as I have for newsgroups;

I try to adapt to the prevailing custom of the forum, even when I
think it's senseless^W suboptimal. But in the case of Usenet, the
traditional snipping for context with interleaved responses is
self-evidently the right one, and I'd extend that to mailing lists of
any size, also.

I'm not sure why every Usenet group has to regularly descend into a
discussion on usenet-wide netiquette, but there you have it.