[CLUE-Tech] A small request for the list.

[Jed S. Baer]

On Thu, 23 May 2002 12:05:44 -0600
bof <bof at pcisys.net> wrote:

> It seems to me that this is a matter of personal preference. If I have a
> short one or two line reply, why should the reader be forced to scroll 
> down the entire page to see it -- it's a waste of my time.
> 
> I do support snipping messages where my reply is not pertinent to the 
> entire message  -- it's a waste of bandwidth to include three or four 
> days of traffic, but I can't support the "top-posting" prohibition.

For very short threads, and maybe the first 1 or 2 replies, it seems to
matter very little. However, when the thread goes beyond that, it quickly
becomes a major pain to scroll up/down/up/down to try to figure out who's
replying to what. Much worse than having to do a single page down, or
CTRL-End (if your mailer supports that).

Replying to Adams mention of inline replying; I think it works very well,
and I'll not that inline replies are always below what's being replied to
(in my experience anyway).

Yes, it can be a personal preference, but overall, especially on long
threads, it seems pretty clear that reply-at-bottom is more easily
followed, and thus I think that mailing lists benefit. I'm not proposing
any rules or prohibitions, just asking folks to consider it (and, as
Zonker pointed out, snipping appropriately - especially the cruft that
gets thrown in by various e-mail services).

OTOH, we could have a flame war ;-)

jed
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