Janet Baraclough wrote:
>> dsi1 wrote:
>
>>> How about you tell me about why top posting is so evil to you.
>
> Because it places conversations out of time sequence. Top-posting is
> fine in email, where the messages arrive in a mutually fixed sequence,
> read only by the participants, who have received the entire exchange in
> the right chronological order, know who they are addressing, what the
> context it, and who said what.
>
> In a newsgroup, there may be a dozen posters holding a conversation
> and a hundred others trying to follow it. Because of time zones etc,
> and the way usenet propagates, many of us see the same posts laid out
> in a different sequence. We rely on the format of each post, to show
> where it fits into the chronology of the thread.
>
> If you top-post a reply to more than one quoted posts, other readers
> can't possibly tell which one you're responding to and if many people do
> it, the entire thread becomes hopelessly jumbled and confusing to other
> readers.
>
> Janet.

Thanks for your calm, rational answer. You'd be surprised at how folks
get ****ed that anybody would question this at all. I guess I'm a funny
sort - I feel nothing at all if someone top posts. I'll have to work
harder at getting more ****ed at folks new to Usenet protocol. :-)