Re: Top posting

Morten,

I don't really care how the posts are made, but if you aren't going
to snip the previous post, I prefer top posting as the answer is
immediatly readable without having to scroll (more reasons for this
at the bottom).


I would agree that these things boil down to simple personal preference.


There are no rules, and the
quicker you accept it, the faster you will stop being annoyed at
people not following what you consider rules. That said, there are
guidelines, and the more guidelines you follow, the more respect you
will get, but guidelines are optional. In a non public, or
semi-public, moderated forum you may enforce rules as you like, but
you may well find out that the less rules enforced, the happier the
community.


As you say, some communities offer guidelines as to how to use their newsgroups, including rules which are enforced by the people responsible for managing these groups. A good example of this, without going outside of the programming community, are the guidelines Borland offer to the users of their newsgroups here:
http://info.borland.com/newsgroups/guide.html

Borland even offers suggestions for newsgroup etiquette here:
http://info.borland.com/newsgroups/netiquette.html

which includes the following:
"Keep quoted text to a minimum. When quoting a previous post, edit out the non-relevant parts of the message. Remove salutations and signatures. A good rule of thumb is, there should not be more quoted text than new text.

NOTE: Under certain circumstances your message may be cancelled for quoting style. One such circumstance is quoting a message that is subsequently determined to be in violation of the newsgroup rules; when the message in violation is cancelled, your message quoting it will also be cancelled. Another special case is EXTREME over-quoting. If you post a very brief reply to a very long message, and you quote the entire message, your message may be cancelled. "

I think such guidelines do a very good job of reducing the signal to noise ratio in a community. I see that Microsoft has published its own rules of conduct, here http://www.microsoft.com/communities/conduct/default.mspx, but these are much less extensive than the Borland ones and as such, in my opinion, leave the newsgroups open to more 'noise'.


--
Thank you,

Christopher Ireland

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