[WikiEN-l] Re: Top-posting

Sat Nov 6 01:13:36 UTC 2004

I've been on USENET since 1989, and nobody ever fussed about 
top-posting until the very late 1990s. People did whatever they chose. 
(People did fuss about not trimming down quoted material from previous 
posts, because bandwidth really was an issue). In the late 1990s 
someone invented some nonexistent netiquette rule about top-posting, 
and people wanting to feel like members of an ingroup began to lambaste 
newbies about it.

If you do a Google Groups search on "top-posting" from 1981 to 1996 you 
will see that there are only 52 hits and _none_ of them refer to 
top-posting as we know it. The hits are on things like 
"way-over-the-top posting" and "I had been given some kind of top 
posting overseas" and "On our system the FAQ was the top posting."

In 1997 we start to see entries like "You can get in a lot of trouble 
in the Netscape newsgroups for 'Top Posting'" and "First, please stop 
'top-posting'." In 1998, "I know some groups prefer 'top' posting, but 
I think they've got it bassackwards, don't you?" There is an exchange

   > If the quoted text is included at the end of your messages instead 
of
   > the beginning, it will significantly increase the speed of reading
   > news.  If you are a fast reader, it might even double it.

     I had a long argument on this with the folks in the NetScape 
newsgroup
     a while back. While I agree with your position in general, they
     argued that it was an issue for `newsgroup standards' (i.e. each
     newsgroup adopts its own practice).

     It seems to me that the `core' issue is whether Newsgroup 
circulation
     is reliable and timely enough so that you usually have the earlier
     messages to which some response is directed. If you do, then Top
     posting makes the most sense, while if you do not, Bottom posting
     wins.

     As News delivery gets more timely and reliable, we would then expect
     Top posting to become more and more `the rule'...

If it originated in the Netscape groups, I don't know why. Maybe, when 
replying to a post, Netscape Communicator's "Collabra" pre-positioned 
the insertion point below the quoted text and perhaps Outlook Express, 
or whatever AOL was using, pre-positioned it at the top? That could 
explain why it became such a bone of contention

By 2000, the level of discourse has become quite elevated: "Now you 
have all become top-posting fjuckheads with no direction at all" and 
"Oh, here we have a member of the top-posting newbie faggot fan club." 
By 2003, "STOP top posting.  That is WHY YOU ARE retarded.  Got clue?" 
and "Hands up who isn'ta top posting fuckwit" and "Good illustration of 
why top posting is only done by noobs."

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/