Top-posting shenanigans (was: Re: ASR33 $1000+ And Counting...)

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Thu Feb 24 20:12:10 2005

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005, Zane H. Healy wrote:

> PS does anyone know how on earth to get MS Lookout to default to a proper
> replying behavior rather than its top-posting nonsense?

Yeah it's simple -- with the mouse, and the delete key. With
Outlook Distress et al you can do it all, it just requires slight
effort.

I've gone back to crappy old[1] pine. I've used Outlook, Outlook
Distress, Netscrape, Mahogany, Evolution, Eudora, Mac, PC, unix,
linux, lots of GUIs, and find they all eat too much 'screen
bandwith' and require too much mousing.

Pine also defaults to "top posting", kinda sorta -- it just quotes
the original message and leaves you with a blinking cursor (I'm
using the 'alternate editor to invoke vi)

It's simple -- ugly[2] posts are bad hygiene and laziness. There,
I've said it.

tomj





[1] Pine's worst feature is that it's single threaded; if I'm
Replying or Composing, I can't look at the index to read and paste
from. With evo I'll open a bunch of Reply windows, as thought
place-holders, and then later abandon them if a later post covers
a subject, etc. Can't do that in pine! (If I can, tell me how!)

This is where the GUIs excel, but it involves too much mousing
which I find grossly irritating and cumbersome. I'd gladly use the
absolute Latest Thing -- if it didn't consume the screen with
needless frills (Evolution uses probably 3% of the screen to tell
me the name of the current folder -- in a bar like a browser
toolbar -- or a dripping dumpster full of worthless feetches. The
OS windowing packages all suck, Gtk and the rest of them. All
those klunky rectangles!)


[2] Ugly presentation I mean, not referring to content, I live in
a glass house too.
Received on Thu Feb 24 2005 - 20:12:10 GMT