This thread seems to be a little bit about Google Groups (a perfectly fine
and handy way to get to newsgroups as well as the home of the most popular
public archive currently) but a lot about different levels of familiarity
with newsgroups and their customs. The FAQ posting for this newsgroup
mentions links to basic background material about newsgroups. Most
thoughtful posters have read this material. Here is a currently valid link
to the RFC FAQ file.
http://vsack.homepage.t-online.de/rfc_faq.html
Here's a re-post from another newsgroup.
Quoted message said:An important corollary to this rule is that one prunes quoted text to
provide only the necessary context.
That principle is important and goes deep, appearing not just in RFC1855
(published 1995, and which anyone seeing this has presumably read, or can
easily read, being as it's roughly the Strunk and White of online fora,
cited by almost every related tutorial ever written) but long before that,
in standard net-etiquette guidelines posted publicly from 1982, which
evolved to RFC1855. The principle appears separately in multiple parts of
RFC1855 (such as 2.1.1, 3.1.1., and 3.1.3). As a further point of possible
net-historical interest, some people in the last few years have tried to
read anti- "top posting" advice into RFC1855 retroactively. Though this is
partly absurd given that RFC1855 predated the "top posting" concern by about
five years,* the granule of truth in it is worth amplifying. 3.1.1 pph 10
proposes constructively (not proscriptively like the anti- "top posting"
admonitions) that people should summarize past-posting context at the
beginning of a reply. To fully "get" that pph though (in the way that
rhetorical exploitation of it does not), you must appreciate the variable
transit times that plagued newsgroup postings for the 15 years preceding
RFC1855. Simultaneous postings routinely arrived hours, or days, apart (the
familiar "time warp," which slowly faded). Thus people would often see
replies before the originals, and others would not understand what someone
replied to. The RFC1855 paragraph itself summarizes its point: "Giving
context helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!"
Apart from all this background, some people lately don't like "top posting"
and will complain. According to RFC1855 (and also in my opinion) the more
serious issue is when postings omit needed context or (more often today)
stupidly include huge past articles intact to add a few lines of reply.
Hope this helps! -- Max
--------
* The "Top posting" habit and reactions to it -- I don't like it much
either, by the way -- are artifacts of certain news reader software that
elevated this issue and got under some people's skin. Until about late
1999 -- which is to say, for the first 20 years of newsgroups, which started
in North Carolina in 1979 -- most archived references to "top post" or "top
posting" have unrelated meaning, such as the top post of the week.
"Content of a follow-up post should exceed quoted content." -- RFC1855
Original version of RFC1855 (including headers, unlike later cuter typeset
version):
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1855.html
