[mythtv-users] OT: DirecTV issue

Alex Malinovich demonbane at the-love-shack.net
Tue Dec 5 18:07:10 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-12-05 at 12:55 -0500, Rich West wrote:
> Jon Bishop wrote:
> >  And,  yea, sorry bout all the top posting, it's a bad habit.
> 
> And what's wrong with top-posting?  ;)  I know it is waaay off topic,
> but I've never got why some lists/people lean towards bottom-posting vs
> top-posting?  I've always seen top-posting at the one that makes more
> sense since what you are looking to read is right there in front of
> you.. no scrolling necessary.  Maybe it's because of the industry I work
> in.. we've found that most users read the subject line and first
> sentence (if we're lucky) regardless if it is quoted material or not. :)
> if we can grab them there, they will read onwards, otherwise, they tend
> to skip right over it.

In a mailing-list context bottom posting is more likely to get people to
help. Top posting is ok for direct emails between individuals on a
short-term basis where they can both remember what was said before and
respond in kind.

However, for someone who's just coming into the thread 3, 4, or 10
emails in, you're most likely to get help from that person if they can
easily get up-to-speed on the discussion. If you're asking about topic
A, and I think I can help you with it, I will. If, however, I have to
dig through 10 of your old emails to figure out what you're talking
about I'm just going to skip it and move on to something more
interesting.

It's the same thing as writing an executive summary at the beginning of
business letters. If the busy management types can't make heads or tails
of your message in the least possible amount of time, they'll never move
on to the rest of it. It's just that, in this case, the "executive
summary" is a brief history of the issue.

-- 
Alex Malinovich
Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY!
Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the
pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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