top posting (off-topic)

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-11-23 21:58, David Kelly <dkelly at hiwaay.net> wrote:
>On Nov 22, 2007, at 9:10 PM, Paul Schmehl wrote:
>> Understood from that perspective, perhaps you can see why people
>> might dislike top posting.
>
> Many here (and elsewhere) will not reply to a top-poster.

I am one of these people.

If I see a top-posted message -- totally incomprehensible, full of
errors, misformattings, and other annoying bits, including mutilated
quotes with completely messed up quoting, and semi-randomly wrapped text
-- then it instantly rings a very important bell:

"The author of this message does not care enough to put some effort into
writing a properly formatted, readable reply.  If he doesn't care enough
to make his message readable, do you really want to spend the effort to
_read_ it?"

The answer is, surprisingly often, "No, I don't think I want to do that".