I never even knew “top posting / bottom posting” was much of a hot topic with anyone until just this week. Strange.

In getting to your blog comparison. Yes, the front page being top posted is the logical way to run a blog. But I think that top posting in archive pages makes no sense.

When I go to a blog that I’ve discovered, and want to go back and read from the beginning of that blog. It’s annoying to have to go to the bottom and read each post moving up. Especially with blogs that have longer posts. You are constantly scrolling down, then up, down, up, etc.

Sadly most blogging systems don’t seem to have any way to reverse this. (I think you can jury rig Movable Type, but that’s about it.)

Thank you for your informative post.

I really did know this top or bottom was even an issue; And I have email since about 1994. But just lately a list nanny sent me a couple of note asking me to bottom post. I found this very odd as I have been on this list for at least six years. But I find it nothing to fight over. I now post that list at the bottom; when I can remember to do so.

How I structure e-mail replies depends on the type of communication and who the recipient(s) will be. Normally I use (and prefer) selective quoting with my responses since that “you said”, “I say”, “you said”, … inter-posting style has a naturally conversational-like flow. Sometimes I’ll trim most of the original quoted text and bottom-post to its specific point and maybe add some unrelated comments. Occasionally I’ll top-post in “business-like” replies for the sake of preserving prior correspondence.

Pure top/bottom-posting often seems sender-centric to me, notably on busy mailing lists after dozens of replies have stacked up. And switching quoting styles mid-thread makes things even messier. Anyone else been frustrated trying to sanely follow those types of convoluted-quote-bloated replies with Gmail conversation threads? I quickly abandoned any hope of read a couple Yahoo! Group lists with Gmail because of the inability to quickly determine who’s replying to what when, worsened by the YG tagline propagation. Hiding/expanding quoted text is ineffective for me in that context. And Apple Mail’s drain-bamaged message threading hardly makes it any easier.
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My brother is a compulsive top-poster, and I never miss a chance to pester him about it. There’s something annoying and distracting with seeing my original message “lazily” appended to the bottom of every reply. With enough begging he sometimes omits it, then quickly reverts to his preferred top-posting style if I don’t nag remind him about how much I hate it.
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Adam wrote:

Top-posting is fine if you’ve got one thing to say. Otherwise, I think it is both more work to put your remarks in context, and more prone to misunderstanding.

I agree it’s more work on the sender’s part putting remarks in context but don’t see how that would be more prone to misunderstanding by recipients (assuming proper formatting on their end).

“Inter-posting” sounds very sensible to me, esp. if everyone were as sensible as you about structuring their initial message.

Top-posting is fine if you’ve got one thing to say. Otherwise, I think it is both more work to put your remarks in context, and more prone to misunderstanding.