There were recently some comments about threading and top posting on this email list. One of the comments made was : its like the "great taste / less filling" debate, it will never be settled. This is not true. The issue was settled and documented in one of the Internet Engineering Task Force, (IETF), documents. Specifically RFC-1855. Its all about people Time and Money. The problems comes about because of the differences between one-to-one and one-to-many communication. Some folks don't see that emailing/posting to just one or two others as being different from emailing to hundreds of other people. However it is. When hundreds of other people have to spend time re familiarizing themselves with the issues and untangling the order of the discussion because the responses were "top-posted" it wastes a huge amount of people time. When just a few people are directly involved they are more focused on the issue under discussion and are not affected by the "out-of-order" presentation of the material. This is directly why the standard of No_Top-Posting exists today. This standard is documented in RFC-1855. Here is the URL: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html >From RFC-1855 Section 3, One to many communication, a relevant paragraph: - If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers understand when they start to read your response. Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context helps everyone. But do not include the entire original! This pretty much sums up the proper way to handle posting a response to a discussion in an email list (as well as Usenet). Please remember the economics of the situation: When you top-post a response you are, in effect, saying that your time is more valuable than the time of the hundreds of other people who read the email list. People like Michael Schwendt and Marco Fioretti as well as most of the other folks in this list provide excellent reasoning and examples of good posting style (As well as good technical info! :-) ). It behooves and benefits us all to emulate those styles. A User Guide for the RedHat install list at: http://www.rhil.org/docs/rhil-guide.html gives an excellent guide for how to use this email list, or any other technical list. RHIL.ORG is a web site created by RedHat users to assist any and all comers with their RedHat systems. -- Jeff Kinz, Open-PC, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA. jkinz@xxxxxxxx copyright 2003. Use is restricted. Any use is an acceptance of the offer at http://www.kinz.org/policy.html. Don't forget to change your password often. -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
