Top-posting
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Top-posting means replying to a message above the original message. This may be a message in an Internet forum, an email message or a Usenet post. Top-posting is considered improper by many definitions of Internet etiquette since it breaks down the flow of the thread:
Because it messes up the flow of reading. > How come? > > I prefer to reply inline. > > > What do you do instead? > > > > No. > > > > > Do you like top-posting? |
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TOFU
Quoting the entire parent message within an answer is sometimes called TOFU (for text over, fullquote under), sometimes it's also called jeopardy-style quoting (alluding to game show Jeopardy!, in which contestants compete to give the correct question given the question's answer). Adding a header and salutations the same conversation becomes:
Hello A.B.! Because it messes up the flow of reading. I prefer to reply inline. Yours, N.N. > On Wednesday, A.B. wrote: > Hello N.N.! > > How come? > What do you do instead? > > Sincerely, > A.B. > > > On Tuesday, N.N. wrote: > > Hello A.B.! > > > > No. > > > > Yours, > > N.N. > > > > On Monday, A.B. wrote: > > > Hello N.N.! > > > > > > Do you like top-posting? > > > > > > Sincerely, > > > A.B. |
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Many people despise this form of quoting, for it resembles a forwarded message more than a discussion. In a forwarded message, it makes sense to arrange comments in a "top-posted" order, as the new portions are introducing the quoted message rather than responding to it:
Hello A.B. ! Here is the relevant portion of the letter that X.Z. sent to our group, as requested. Yours, N.N. > On Wednesday, X.Y. wrote, > Hi, team! > > Please work on portions 5 and 9 for Friday. The customer says > the rest isn't critical, as they mention below. > > Thanks, > X.Z. > > On Monday, Customer wrote: > > Dear Sir, > > > > We will need to have the new doohicky method implemented, as well > > as the heffalump output. We really need this by Friday, and if > > your team needs to shift focus to achieve those two deliverables, > > we can wait until afterward for the remainder of the work. > > > > Thank you, > > J. Customer |
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Those who prefer top-posting say it has an acquired taste and that the space wasted by the full quote is negligible in our day of inlined graphics and messages bounced between departments without warning. Those who use the TOFU method can be characterized by their lack of concern about the issue, so they're not too vocal about it. Some of them are not even aware that any other quoting style exists.
Those who prefer inline replies, on the other hand, are often vocal and "evangelizing" on the subject, which others can find annoying at times.
Bottom-posting
Though the naïve response to 'top-posting' might be to 'bottom-post', this implies that the only difference is that the response comes at the bottom of all the quoted material instead of atop it. This is also problematic, since if the quoted material is large, it is just as much trouble to scan for relevant material before reading the reply.
Inline replies
The preferred - by some - means of replying is to trim the quoted material so that only the relevant parts needed for context remain, and reply underneath each one in a natural discussion style.
This style is often called 'inline reply' or 'interleaved reply', though it is sometimes confusingly called 'bottom-posting'. The request to 'trim quotes' is a common companion to this.
> > > Do you like top-posting? > > No. > How come? Because it messes up the flow of reading. > What do you do instead? I prefer to reply inline. |
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Adding small headers this looks like:
> > * A.B.: > > > Do you like top-posting? > * N.N.: > > No. * A.B.: > How come? Because it messes up the flow of reading. > What do you do instead? I prefer to reply inline. |
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Or with the words of RFC 1855, the Netiquette Guidelines, which comprise a comprehensive set of netiquette conventions:
- If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers understand when they start to read your response.
Some would add that you should also include a blank line in between quoted material and responses to ensure that they are clearly set off from one another. Some mail programs may even try to re-word-wrap entire paragraphs and cause quotes and replies to be jumbled together illegibly if they are not cleanly separated. A common mistake is to leave "tails" of greater-than signs (">") above or below a quoted block, running into the preceding or following paragraph of new material, instead of creating an entirely blank line as a separator.
Some particularly energetic adherents to portions of RFC 1855 end up trimming large amounts.
Usage
Unsurprisingly, different online communities differ on whether or not top posting is objectionable; but if it is found objectionable in a particular community, top-posting in that community will generally be seen as major breach of etiquette and will provoke particularly vehement responses from self-named community regulars.
Objections to top-posting, as a general rule, seem to come from persons who first went online in the earlier days of Usenet, and in communities that date to Usenet's early days. Among the most vehement communities are those in the Usenet comp.lang hierarchy, especially comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++. Etiquette is looser (as is almost everything) in the alt hierarchy. Newer online participants, especially those with limited experience of Usenet, tend as a general rule, to be less sensitive to top-posting, and tend to reject any argument against top-posting as irrelevant. A typical contrarian view holds that their software top-posts and they like it.
It may be that users used to older, terminal-oriented software which was unable to easily show references to posts being replied to, learned to prefer the summary that not top-posting gives; it's also likely that the general slower propagation times of the original Usenet groups made that summary a useful reminder of older posts. As news and mail readers have become more capable, and as propagation times have grown shorter, newer users may find top-posting more efficient.
Microsoft has had a significant influence on top-posting by the ubiquity of its software; its email and newsreader software top-posts by default, and in several cases makes it difficult not to top-post; many users apparently have accepted Microsoft's default as a de facto standard.
Perhaps because of Microsoft's influence, top-posting is more common on mailing lists and in personal email. Top-posting is viewed as seriously destructive to mailing-list digests, where multiple levels of top-posting are difficult to skip. It is, moreover, nearly irresistible to post an entire digest back to the mailing list, then top-post a reply to that message.
Finally, top-posting is simply a custom, a shibboleth like wearing neckties or eating with one's right hand, that serves to identify one's membership in a particular community. This self-identification function probably serves as much as any other factor to reinforce its use: one can't expect much help in comp.lang.c++ if one self-identifies as a "barbarian" by top-posting. In this way, not top-posting is similar to other customs employed by other communities: the UNIX community; the various programmer "cultures"; the "New Jersey/Bell Labs", the "MIT/Cambridge", or the "West Coast/Berkeley" "communities"; the AOL "community".
External links
- top-post in jargon dictionary
- Why is Bottom-posting better than Top-posting (http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html)
- Ursine:Top_Posting - Why Top Posting is Considered Harmful, and why Bottom Posting also isn't the answer
- RFC 1855 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt) - Netiquette Guidelines
- Dan's Mail Format Site: Quoting (http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/)
- Outlook Quotefix (http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/outlook-quotefix/) and Outlook Express Quotefix (http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/) - third party utilities for automatically reformatting quoted text in Microsoft mail products