[thelist] Please trim, please don't top post.

[Stuart Young]

> The sooner people stop top-posting, the better.

It's not people - you will rarely get people to change their behaviour
- it's the default behaviour of email clients that needs to change.

whether someone top or bottom posts is not really the issue, it is
trimming that is important and top-posting does encourage people to
forget about trimming leading to messages that include many complete old
emails at the bottom.

A list I am on used to auto-enforce trimming rules - I really support
that - occassionally you would have to add lines of blank space for the
email to be accepted by the list (in order to make the ratio of new
material to old material high enough) but otherwise it only blocked your
email if you didn't trim enough, or you had nothing to say.

cheers


Dr Stuart Young,       +64 (0)9-815 4321 Ex 8656
<syoung at unitec.ac.nz>     
Lecturer, School of Computing and Information Technology,
Unitec New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand
http://hyperdisc.unitec.ac.nz/staff/syoung.htm
I would provide a URL for my official staffpage, but its too long and
complex