20 Responses to “An ode to bottom-posting”

1. Dan Ridley says:
   December 13th, 2005 at 12:50 pm

   And he’s right. So there. :-P

2. Tim says:
   December 13th, 2005 at 12:59 pm

   Yeah, I get the “Yes, it is; No, it isn’t” bit. :)

   But why is he right?

3. Matt Schinckel says:
   December 13th, 2005 at 9:42 pm

   The only reason I stopped bottom posting is that other people always assumed I just hit “Reply” and then “Send”, without adding any content.

   I’m always tempted to go back to it, though.

4. Tim says:
   December 13th, 2005 at 10:29 pm

   hehehe… That’s good. :)

5. Joe Kissell says:
   December 14th, 2005 at 6:34 am

   I generally prefer bottom posting, and mention that fact in my ebooks about Mail. But then, I also recommend selective quoting, not simply including the entire content of an email in a reply. The two practices make sense if done together, and less sense if you do only one. I wouldn’t put a reply beneath several quoted paragraphs, because that’s hard to read and annoying. But I would pull out a relevant sentence or two, to remind the recipient exactly what it is I’m commenting on.

   A situation where I often use top posting is if an entire message makes just one point or asks one question. In that case, there’s no reason to go to the extra effort of pulling out bits and commenting beneath them. But if a message makes multiple points or asks multiple questions, and I intend to address them one at a time, bottom posting is the only way to go, because it gives the recipient context for each remark.

6. Tim says:
   December 14th, 2005 at 8:10 am

   That seems a very sane approach to me. Of course, you are right, the major usability problem with bottom-posting is that people don’t trim, but still expect you to scroll down to read their contribution.

7. TonyAndrewMeyer » Obscurity says:
   December 14th, 2005 at 8:30 am

   [...] HawkWings found my quoting tutorial (prepared for the Written Communication for Information Sciences paper at Massey), which has been on my website since the 27th of October last year (about 13.5 months).? Go figure. [...]

8. Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Joe Kissell on top- vs bottom-posting says:
   December 14th, 2005 at 10:20 am

   [...] I confess. I enjoy teasing hard-core ideologues who consider top-posting in emails history’s most heinous crime. It’s a character flaw, but I can’t help it. [...]

9. Dan Ridley says:
   December 14th, 2005 at 11:55 am

   Yeah, I get the “Yes, it is; No, it isn?” bit. :) But why is he right?

   Yeah, I know there wasn’t much real content in my comment, but hey, you were already pointing to the reasons bottom posting is good, noble and true — how much can I really add to that?

   Besides, the prior discussion didn’t sway you, so you’re obviously a hopeless case :-)

   To be realistic, though, I think we need to acknowledge that there are really three positions here. The traditional, rational, One True Way e-mail quoting schema isn’t really “bottom posting,” except when dealing with a fairly small message being replied to. Call it “contextual posting,” or something less pompous if you have a better idea, but the fact that the quoted text is trimmed and contextualized is far more important than its placement.

   Just quoting the whole text of a long message in one huge block is useless, no matter where you put it, and if that’s what you’re going to do, then you may as well top-post, so the useless quote block can be easily ignored.

   To take a trivial example, I replied to a message yesterday involving a fairly detailed set of recommendations (related to choosing between backup methods). It was not a particularly long or complicated e-mail; maybe half a page printed material, but there were eight seperate questions or points to address. If I’d top-posted, I’d have either had to repeat the original e-mail a lot (”And in response to the question of how many hard drives you can put in your computer…”), or some other ridiculous formation.

   In another trivial example, I replied yesterday to an e-mail from about two months ago. It’s entirely possible the original sender wouldn’t immediately know what I was talking about from the subject line. Quoting the entire original message would be unweildy, whether it was at the top or bottom; but putting the first sentence and the one question from their original message at the top gave them an immediate context — enough to be quite sure what the subject was, and what question I was answering.

   And etc etc. Here’s my counter-question: what argument can be made in favor of top posting? Aside from the arguments for bottom posting, which I can talk all day about (did you notice?) and which, of course, I think are nearly self-evident — I also see one big, huge, hulking, swaggering argument against top-posting — which is that it encourages people to just lazily quote the whole untrimmed text of the previous message. (If there’s no context provided anyway, why bother trimming?) A bad habit encouraging an even worse habit….

10. Dan Ridley says:
    December 14th, 2005 at 12:01 pm

    Ha. Just noticed that I quoted and bottom-posted in my previous comment. I didn’t intend that to be self-referential, it just comes naturally :-)

11. Tim says:
    December 14th, 2005 at 3:38 pm

    “Contextual posting” - I like it. A good phrase.

    I think that the biggest argument in favour of top-posting (apart from my beautiful if tendentious metaphor of the fridge) is the efficiency with which it imparts the information you need. 95% of the time, I remember what I was replying to. So I don’t need to scroll at all.

    Of course, you and Joe have an excellent point about multi-issues replies to which there is no top-posting answer, but I don’t think more than 20% of my emails fall into that category. For the most part, they are answers to single issues.

    I’m not to worried about the untrimmed rubbish underneath a top-posted reply. At least my replies are in plain text and pretty small, even when I (gasp!) forget to trim myself.

    I feel a “tease-free consensus” coming on that the happiest person is the one able to do both as and if needed, with some energy left over to worry some of the important things in their lives. What do you think?

12. Dan Ridley says:
    December 14th, 2005 at 8:40 pm

    But… don’t you think this is of vital importance to, um, our health amd happiness, and, um, national security, um… Yeah, okay.

    I think as long as you are able and willing to trim & quote when it’s neccesary to convey context, I don’t have any argument with you.

    For the trivial cases, I don’t notice or care about the quoting style on messages I receive. If you know how to handle yourself when it matters, that’s plenty good enough.

    I’d still feel a little dirty if I actually did it, though :-P

    [ Bonus content: my favorite reply to any message this week:

    Yum. Er. Um. Brr. Hmm???

    That was sent to me as a top-post, no less. :-) ]

13. Dan Ridley says:
    December 14th, 2005 at 8:50 pm

    Sorry ’bout the bolded last line there. You ever gonna add a Preview button to this comment box?

14. Tim says:
    December 14th, 2005 at 9:31 pm

    Your wish is my command! :-)

    I never thought of it before. When I started this blog, no one commented much.

    Sorry about the bolded last line there. You ever gonna add a Preview button to this comment box?

15. Dan Ridley says:
    December 15th, 2005 at 4:29 am

    Ooh, that was quick. Thanks. And real-time preview like all the cool kids have, not just a button.

16. Tim says:
    December 15th, 2005 at 9:08 am

    Ah, yes. Buttons are for bottom-posters.

    Live previews are for those who want their information quickly and with no additional mouse clicks or scrolling. :-P

    (Actually, Live Comment Preview was just the first Wordpress plug-in that I stumbled across on the Net.)

17. sjk says:
    April 2nd, 2006 at 12:36 pm

    Just reading Tim’s second-to-last “top-post” reply made me realize what bothers me most about that style:

    It often causes a switch of attention focus to the bottom of a message to gain context about what I’m reading at the top.

    When necessary, I want to quickly “grok” any older contextual content before reading newer content. So, as a top-to-bottom reader, putting the old after the new with top-posting has an unnaturally backwards flow for me.

    I have a similar frustration using mail clients that try forcing me to read newest messages first, as though I’d rather see something written without having any context about it from older related messages.

    There are situations when newest-first is desirable but I don’t think that should be the default method of e-mail correspondence, which top-posting and newest-first clients seem to encourage.

    Always a fun topic, is this. :-)

18. sjk says:
    April 2nd, 2006 at 12:47 pm

    Back now after reading TonyAndrewMeyer’s article, which elaborates the same points I wrote here. Sorry for the redundancy, tho’ it’s inevitable with thoroughly-seasoned topics like this one.

19. Tim says:
    April 2nd, 2006 at 4:43 pm

    That’s a good point about the switch of attention focus.

    I don’t notice it, probably because I dont have enough email conversations on the go at one time that I ever forget what they are about and need to check the bottom again.

    I need more friends obviously ;-)

20. Dan Ridley says:
    April 3rd, 2006 at 4:41 am

    I dont have enough email conversations on the go at one time that I ever forget what they are about and need to check the bottom again.

    Even so, I’m sure you occasionally get things that would be a little wacky out of order. If nothing else, every e-mailer I know occasionally gets a “oops, here’s the attachment I said was on the last message” :-)

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