i so, so loathe the practice of top posting. it’s just so goddamned lazy. you can’t be arsed to delete extraneous text, and you force me to go in search of context for whatever you’re remarking on.

while i find top posting distasteful in a social email situation, because it’s just ugly as sin, i find it damn near unforgivable in the course of a technical discussion with colleagues. look, you ask question A, i respond with answer A beneath question A, now you don’t give clarification to question A-slash-correction of answer A forty lines of text before what the hell the original question was!

 From: Someone Responding to Sabrina via Email Subject: re: foo  But you forgot to think about this other thing here.    -----Original Message------ From: sabrina downard Subject: Re: foo  : How do we do this thing?  Like this. 

that example email needed to be five lines long, and it was twice that. and top posted responses just get uglier and uglier and uglier, and longer and longer and longer, because people can never be bothered to clear out the irrelevant shit. ugh. not to mention the confusion between the quoted material that isn’t actually marked quoted by use of a quote-indicator, such as > or :, and the new material.

top posting is just a sign of laziness, and i detest it.