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.
Spanish restaurant in ManhattanWell after searching around for restaurants i thought this would be a great place to help me out. So I hope you don't mind me coming in here and channeling it through...
Here's a re-post from another newsgroup.
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
About the Restaurant RulesGoomba38 I'm not saying what's right, just what is. When was the last time you heard the music kids listen to... when was the last time you've been to a movie...
-------- * 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):
