Posting styles

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When a message is replied to in e-mail, Internet forums, and Usenet the original can often be included, or "quoted", in a variety of different posting styles.

The main options are "top-posting" — replying above the original message; "bottom-posting" — replying below; or "interleaved posting". While each online community differs on which styles are appropriate or acceptable, within any community the use of the "wrong" method risks being seen as a major breach of netiquette, and could possibly provoke vehement response from community regulars.

Contents

[edit] Top-posting

This method includes the entire parent message (and usually previous messages) verbatim with the reply appended above it:

No problems.  6pm it is then.
Jim

At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote:
> Wooh!  Hold on.  I have job scheduled at 5:30 which mails out 
> a report to key tech staff.  Can you not push it back an hour?
> Danny
> 
> At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote,
> > I'm going to suspend the mail service for approx. thirty
> > minutes tonight, starting at 5pm, to install some updates 
> > and important fixes.
> > Jim

This style of posting resembles forwarding messages with new text appended at the top:

Hello A.B. !

Here is the relevant portion of the letter that X.Z.
sent to our group, as requested.

Yours,
N.N.

On Wednesday, X.Y. wrote,
> Hi, team!
> 
> Please work on portions 5 and 9 for Friday.  The customer says 
> the rest isn't critical, as they mention below.
> 
> Thanks,
> X.Z.
> 
> On Monday, Customer wrote:
> > Dear Sir,
> > 
> > We will need to have the new doohicky method implemented, as well 
> > as the heffalump output.  We really need this by Friday, and if
> > your team needs to shift focus to achieve those two deliverables,
> > we can wait until afterward for the remainder of the work.
> > 
> > Thank you,
> > J. Customer

Top-posting is the more common style in e-mail environments, especially business. One benefit of the style is that when a new correspondent is included in an ongoing discussion (due to forwarding or addition of new recipients), the background of the discussion, or "thread", is readily available, with the most recent response immediately visible at the top.[1][2] (In environments where the entire discussion is public, inclusion of past discussion is not necessary, and trim-posting is sufficient.) The default quote format and cursor placement of many popular e-mail applications, such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail, encourages top-posting.

Other arguments for top-posting:

  • Scrolling down through a post to find a reply is inconvenient, especially for short replies to long messages.
  • Some believe that inline posting should be applied only to threaded discussions such as newsgroups, but defer to "top-sending" for interpersonal e-mail. Proper customer service often requires that all points be addressed in a clear manner that doesn't require any quoting. The original e-mail message is included as an attachment or at the bottom, merely as evidence.
  • Especially in business correspondence, an entire message thread may need to be forwarded to a third party for handling or discussion. In this case, it is appropriate to "top-post" the handling instructions or discussion above the quoted message.
  • Many inexperienced computer users don't know about any alternative to top-posting, and may not know to scroll down to find a reply to their query. (When communicating with the public via interpersonal e-mail, one might indicate inline replies with a notice at the top such as "I have replied below.")

Some maintain that top-posting is never appropriate, and refer to it jokingly as the "TOFU" method (from the German "text oben, fullquote unten", sometimes translated "text over, fullquote under")[3] or "jeopardy-style quoting"[4] (alluding to game show Jeopardy!, in which contestants compete to give the correct question to a given answer).

[edit] Bottom-posting

Another style of replying to messages has been dubbed "bottom-posting" in contrast with "top-posting". "Bottom-posted" messages typically have some of the quoted material trimmed.

> > At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote,
> > I'm going to suspend the mail service for approx. thirty
> > minutes tonight, starting at 5pm, to install some updates 
> > and important fixes.
> 
> At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote:
> Wooh!  Hold on.  I have job scheduled at 5:30 which mails out 
> a report to key tech staff.  Can you not push it back an hour?

No problems.  6pm it is then.

[edit] Inline replying

In practice, "bottom-posting" is usually performed as "inline replying" (or "interleaved reply" or "point-by-point rebuttal", though it is sometimes also called "bottom-posting"), where quoted material and replies are interleaved, giving a specific response to each paragraph or sentence.

The request to "trim quotes (leaving only the relevant quoted material)" is a common companion to this, and some refer to this style as "trim-posting". Paragraphs which are not replied to are frequently "snipped" (see below).

> On Thursday, Jim wrote:
> When considering the variation in style between the original
> novel and the movie adaptation, it is clear to see that
[snipped...]

Yes, but almost twenty years separates the book and the film.

> The movie clearly adds a sense of menace to the story which
> is not present in the original book.  This is unacceptable
[Darker interpretation pros and cons, trimmed...]

I agree.  The darker tone works well, once one understands 
the two are aimed at different audiences.

This style of posting is frequent on Usenet, Internet forums, and other situations in which the previous discussion is publicly available. This is also sometimes used in email, particularly in certain UNIX-based communities.[citation needed]

Inline/interleaved posters generally use the following arguments:

  • Inline posting creates a natural, chronological ordering to each segment of the discussion stored within a message.
  • Inline posting promotes the practice of trimming quoted text to prevent signature blocks, free-mail-service ads, and corporate disclaimers piling up in a growing useless "tail" at the end.
  • Inline posting doesn't require the poster to recap each issue being addressed, as comments can be made point-for-point against the original message, making for a more structured, disciplined and unambiguous reply.
  • Inline replies keep related sections of a discussion together within a message. As such it is easier to fork off parallel 'threads' of discussion from a single source message, each perhaps dealing with only one specific point (or subset of points) from the original.

Inline/interleaved advocates may respond to top-posting arguments with the following:

  • Scrolling down to find the fresh material would not be a problem if the quoted text was appropriately trimmed.
  • Email has long supported a convention for forwarding verbatim entire messages, including their headers. An untrimmed quoted message is a weaker form of transcript, as key pieces of meta information are destroyed. (This is why an ISP's postmaster will typically insist on a forwarded copy of any problematic email, rather than a quote.)

[edit] Netiquette Guidelines

In the words of RFC 1855, the RFC Netiquette Guidelines, which comprise a comprehensive set of voluntary netiquette conventions:

If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers understand when they start to read your response.

This section of the RFC is discussing public archived postings such as mailing lists and newsgroups. For interpersonal e-mail, the subject line is often sufficient to remind the sender of what was being discussed, and no quoting of any type is necessary to indicate a reply. However, if one is politely addressing points of a conversation, the points discussed should be explicitly stated or quoted inline. This is stated in the RFC regarding interpersonal communication such as email:

When replying to a message, include enough original material to be understood but no more. It is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.

Some would add that one should also include a blank line in between quoted material and responses to ensure that they are clearly set off from one another. Some mail programs may even try to re-word-wrap entire paragraphs and cause quotes and replies to be jumbled together illegibly if they are not cleanly separated. A common mistake is to leave "tails" of greater-than signs (">") above or below a quoted block, running into the preceding or following paragraph of new material, instead of creating an entirely blank line as a separator.

When the technique of doing a point-by-point reply beneath the text of an original document is applied to news articles, it is known as fisking.

[edit] Snipping/trimming

If quoting large sections of discussion, particularly in newsgroup discussions, it is acceptable to trim the message such that only a taste of the original (a reminder) is left — even if this means leaving a sentence hanging. In such a circumstance it is customary to append an indicator, usually in the form of a square bracketed tag to the effect of [snipped], [trimmed], or simply [...].

If the precise nature of the quote is not immediately apparent from the remaining text, it is polite to include a brief 'subject' text in the bracket, so the original author's words are not misunderstood by readers unfamiliar with the original.

[edit] Double-quoting

Another style involves replying in an interleaved manner to selected quotes from the original message, as described above, but then following this with a fullquote of the entire message, as if top-posting. This results in some portions of the original message being quoted twice, which some consider wasteful.

[edit] Attribution lines

Since quoted material frequently becomes several levels deep, if a relevant point is retained during a discussion, "attribution lines" are commonly used to indicate the author of each part of the quoted material.

> > Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> > > Do you like top-posting?

> Nancy Nguyen wrote:
> > No.

Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> How come?

Because it messes up the flow of reading.

> What do you do instead?

I prefer to reply inline.

Many mail user agents will add these attribution lines automatically to the top of the quoted material. Retaining these lines as the discussion continues results in this style:

Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> Nancy Nguyen wrote:
> > Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> > > Do you like top-posting?
> > No.
> How come?

Because it messes up the flow of reading.

> What do you do instead?

I prefer to reply inline.

[edit] Usage

Objections to top-posting, as a rule, seem to come from persons who first went online in the earlier days of Usenet, and in communities that date to Usenet's early days. Among the most vehement communities are those in the Usenet comp.lang hierarchy, especially comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++. Etiquette is looser (as is almost everything) in the alt hierarchy. Newer online participants, especially those with limited experience of Usenet, tend to be less sensitive to arguments about posting style.

It may be that users used to older, terminal-oriented software which was unable to easily show references to posts being replied to, learned to prefer the summary that not top-posting gives; it is also likely that the general slower propagation times of the original Usenet groups made that summary a useful reminder of older posts. As news and mail readers have become more capable, and as propagation times have grown shorter, newer users may find top-posting more efficient.

Microsoft has had a significant influence on top-posting by the ubiquity of its software; its e-mail and newsreader software top-posts by default, and in several cases makes it difficult not to top-post; many users have accepted this as a de facto standard.

Perhaps because of Microsoft's influence, top-posting is more common on mailing lists and in personal e-mail. Top-posting is viewed as seriously destructive to mailing-list digests, where multiple levels of top-posting are difficult to skip. The worst case would be top-posting while including an entire digest as the original message.

[edit] Other meanings

"Top-posting" can also refer to the practice of deleting and re-posting a message (where allowable) so that it appears at the top of a list or index, in order for it to be more visible. See bumping.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Quoting: Top Posting — Dan's Mail Format Site
  2. ^ Sensible email — Blog post and discussion
  3. ^ TOFU — from the Jargon file
  4. ^ Jeopardy-style quoting — from the Jargon file

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../p/o/s/Posting_styles.html"