In message , VanguardLH
writes:
[bit snipped]
There has been a long-time argument between old-timers in Usenet with
new[er] posters (mostly accustomed to top-posting as that is the default
in e-mail replies) regarding top versus bottom posting. My opinion is

The bigger problem is lack of snipping, and also all the reply/followup
being in one place, either at the beginning or the end. I interpost -
that is, I insert my responses between parts of what I'm responding to
(I post them _after_ the point I'm responding to - I just find that more
natural, and otherwise it's like the "most irritating thing on usenet" Q
and A - or rather A and Q - joke). But I also try to snip a lot.

that you massage your quoted content to match your posting style. If
not then you don't have a posting style and instead will post a mess.
If you top-post then you arrange all quoted content in the same order.
That means having to rearrange all the cited posts if the parent post
had them in bottom-posted order.

Which is _very_ tedious, and also error-prone.

If you bottom-post then you make sure
all the cited posts are also in bottom-posted order. You putting your
new content in a reply at the top or bottom without regard to the same
order in the quoted content means you are lazy and messy. Alas, most
posters fall into the first category: they're lazy, use whatever the
client generates, don't review their posts before submission, and don't
trim the quoted content.

Regardless of top- or bottom-posting, signatures ALWAYS go at the *end*
of a reply. That chap is top-posting and his client (probably Outlook
Express) is adding the signature right after his added content in his
reply. That was/is a problem with Outlook Express and why it is the
bane of Usenet and despised by many old-timers for ****ing up the
posting order (top vs bottom) and putting the sig in the wrong place.
So came about OE-QuoteFix

And Outlook-Quotefix

(which got abandoned and got crippled by
changes in content rendering by OE).

The Outlook one worked up to, IIRR, the 2003 version. Or the one before.

An update in Windows XP's service
pack 3 added registry entries where the user could alter the behavior of
OE: add signature after the newly added content (old default) or at the
end of the entire post (the de facto standard), along with another
setting to determine the default position of the insert cursor when
composing a new message (at the 'end' to effect bottom-posting instead
of the prior default of at the top as used with e-mail).

I have always contended that placing the cursor at the top wasn't
_necessarily_ evil: if you were going to respond to points in order, and
do some snipping, then that's where you'd want it. But so few people
were _taught_ how to do that, they just type all their reply where the
cursor is - it's not _all_ laziness, some of it is just not knowing any
better.

However,
because many (perhaps most) posters are lazy, they never read the
changes made by SP3 for WinXP to know there registry settings became
available to change posting order and sig placement. After all, they're
lazy, so their post is whatever their client generates and the poster
doesn't bother editing anything other than their new content which they
don't review before clicking the Send button.

(-:

You mean, like you're doing (-:? [Sorry, couldn't resist ...]

Sometimes I jab with the retort, "Stop whining about my whining."

Good one.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"Purgamentum init, exit purgamentum." Translation: "Garbage in, garbage out."