Dear Gunnar,

> I disagree about the principle that top-posting should
> always be avoided. Bottom-posting an answer to a
> message which fills the entire screen may be very
> confusing, as you don't see the answer at once.

One should use one's common sense -- but that is not quite what is meant by
top-posting. Top-posting is generally understood to be piling up message
after message in replies back and forth without deleting all that is
redundant. I don't want to make a big issue of this and make Ole feel
uncomfortable, but if you look at his last message, you will see that he
top-posted onto three previous messages followed by a whole load of garbage.
There are several issues here. If messages are archived by a group, it
makes searching topics / threads confusing. Also, many people have slow
connections AND have to pay by the minute for connection times (like me) --
if everybody did the same as Ole, then my phone bill would steadily increase
with no benefit to me.

Generally, it is regarded as good netiquette to snip out = [snip] and only
quote the necessary pieces of a previous message that are required to make
sense. In fact, if you do not do this and top-post, as I have described, in
some groups such as the academic H-NET ones, your message does not get
posted.

So, no big deal really, but just a question of mindfulness.

Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge