Re: Could we drop the bottom-posting rule?

I'm just going to say... - almost all modern mail clients are threaded, it's trivial to view context, so I want to see replies "above the fold" - bottom posting goes against the grain of modern mail clients - overall, it just feels like arbitrary preferences set decades ago; worst case it feels like hazing against people who don't use mutt/pine I personally top-post (as it's the default for all the mail clients I use) when replying unless it's a point-by-point reply, in which case I reply inline. I'm not bothered by bottom posting nor do I make a fuss when I see other conventions, but it's more inconvenient to read. (I also have to set my client to plain text manually per message - that's another can of worms...) On Mon, 2021-05-10 at 22:51 +0100, Kamil Tekiela wrote: > Hi Internals, > > Could we drop the bottom-posting rule? > > Almost all new contributors fall into this trap and reply to a thread > by > top-posting, only to get chastised by someone else on the list. It's > really > difficult to remember to delete the default reply. Mail clients don't > make > it easy for us; it's hidden by default. Bottom-posting makes reading > the > thread much more difficult too. The actual reply gets lost in between > the > quoted content. I often get confused about what is new and what was > quoted. Many modern clients are designed to handle top-posting and > don't > handle bottom-posting well. People are usually used to it and they > read > from top to bottom. I don't know if in the past some mail clients > defaulted > to bottom-posting but right now it just seems like an unnecessary > annoyance. > > If you want to quote someone then it makes sense to copy a part of > the > message and then add a reply below, but forcing people to remove the > default reply from the mail client and then add the whole previous > message > on top of your own reply isn't very productive. It wastes time and > screen > space. > > Could we please change this rule or at least stop enforcing it? > Do people actually have mail clients that don't automatically hide > the > previous conversation? If not, then I think we can let people top- > post. > > Regards, > Kamil