Top-posting
March 28th, 2006 by Samuel TardieuA bet. A stupid bet. I lost it.
As a consequence, I have to endure one of the most difficult and unpleasant challenge that I can think of. I have to top-post for one whole month. Effective yesterday evening.
I will try to answer my email and usenet posts without any context whenever possible. Please bear with me if I have to keep some quotes.
March 28th, 2006 at 22:28
Whom did you make this über-geek bet against?
March 28th, 2006 at 22:36
In fact, this was a bet made against a lot of people. In this game, everyone in turn makes a promise to do something if he draws the “wrong” card in a deck (typically, you give this role to an oudler). There were only three cards left, so I had a winning probability of 2/3. Moreover, I knew exactly where the wrong card was, so I didn’t hesitate to accept the challenge whispered by a geeky friend.
Unfortunately, the other people in the room insisted on shuffling the cards after I announced the challenge and before I drew my card…
March 28th, 2006 at 23:09
Note that the other proposal was “I will use Windows for one whole month on my home machine”. But I could not take the risk of not being able to use my machine at all for one month.
And I confess, I bottom-posted once today, by mistake. But I find this to be an enlightning experience; give as much context as possible in your answer to be able to trim the whole beginning of the thread.
March 28th, 2006 at 23:13
C’est vraiment über-con, comme pari
Tu t’ennuies tant que ça en ce moment ? Ou tu avais trop bu, peut-être ?
March 28th, 2006 at 23:14
Ni l’un ni l’autre. Franchement, ça oblige à être un peu créatif dans les réponses.
March 29th, 2006 at 0:39
So you took a bet knowing that you had a 33% probability of annoying and confusing all your correspondents for a whole month?
March 29th, 2006 at 7:07
Well… sorry to disagree here. I’m top-replying quite often for about a year now, when it can be useful for the receiver. Especially when you reply to an old or very long message and you don’t want to answer each line (which I usually do for a quick reply) because it would not be relevant. It is also useful when dealing with “formal” messages, where you’d better keep track of the previous exchange.
So sometimes, yes, top-posting can actually help your correspondent, and even be less annoying, more efficient, less time-consuming. You can still be creative, in particular by structuring your reply independently from the original message, without loosing the context or paraphrasing.
But I hate to receive three times in a row the complete thread of messages exchanged by a group within a single day!
March 30th, 2006 at 15:20
I love people who top-reply. Use some stupid ‘enterprise class’ tools and you’ll see that anyway
you don’t have the choice.
No frankly : top-reply = spam probability higher. Let’s support the Geeks.
December 17th, 2006 at 2:27
Hello,
I am having trouble with my Internet explorer.It is doing some very odd things.Sometimes it will completely close the page i am visiting for no reason or it will be very slow loading pages and when i say slow i mean very very very slow for eg i tried to google something and after 10 minutes of the page trying to load i gave up.I thought that it was perhaps the topic i was searching so i tried putting in random things to see if that made any difference but it didn’t.Another problem i had was when i was on a forum and clicked on a link and nothing happened i tried to open a new tab and that wouldn’t work either and it would let me access any options that are in my tools menu.i had to restart my computer.Just to let you know i have high speed Internet connection.Thanks in advance to anyone that helps me with this problem.
December 17th, 2006 at 2:31
aladavlis: http://www.getfirefox.com