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Posting style

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Top-posting means replying to a message above the original message. This may be a message in an Internet forum, an e-mail message or a Usenet post. Top-posting is a perennial source of contention in many forums.

TOFU

Quoting the entire parent message within an answer is sometimes called TOFU (for text over, fullquote under)[1], sometimes it's also called jeopardy-style quoting[2] (alluding to game show Jeopardy!, in which contestants compete to give the correct question given the question's answer). Adding a header and salutations, the same conversation becomes: 

No problems.  6pm it is then.
Jim

> At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote:
> Wooh!  Hold on.  I have job scheduled at 5:30 which mails out 
> a report to key tech staff.  Can you not push it back an hour?
> Danny

> > At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote,
> > I'm going to suspend the mail service for approx. thirty
> > minutes tonight, starting at 5pm, to install some updates 
> > and important fixes.
> > Jim

This style of posting resembles forwarding messages with new text appended at the top: 

Hello A.B. !

Here is the relevant portion of the letter that X.Z. sent to our group, as requested.

Yours,
N.N.

On Wednesday, X.Y. wrote,
> Hi, team!
> 
> Please work on portions 5 and 9 for Friday.  The customer says 
> the rest isn't critical, as they mention below.
> 
> Thanks,
> X.Z.
> 
> On Monday, Customer wrote:
> > Dear Sir,
> > 
> > We will need to have the new doohicky method implemented, as well 
> > as the heffalump output.  We really need this by Friday, and if
> > your team needs to shift focus to achieve those two deliverables,
> > we can wait until afterward for the remainder of the work.
> > 
> > Thank you,
> > J. Customer

Those who prefer top-posting say it has an acquired taste and that the space wasted by the full quote is negligible in our day of inlined graphics and messages bounced between departments without warning[citation needed]. Those who use the TOFU method can be characterized by their lack of concern about the issue, so they are not too vocal about it. Some of them are not even aware that any other quoting style exists.

Those who prefer inline replies, on the other hand, are occasionally vocal and "evangelizing" on the subject.

Bottom-posting

The traditional style of replying to messages has been dubbed "bottom-posting" by contrast with "top-posting". "Bottom-posted" messages typically trim more of the quoted material. 

> > At 9.40am Wednesday, Jim wrote,
> > I'm going to suspend the mail service for approx. thirty
> > minutes tonight, starting at 5pm, to install some updates 
> > and important fixes.
> 
> At 10.01am Wednesday, Danny wrote:
> Wooh!  Hold on.  I have job scheduled at 5:30 which mails out 
> a report to key tech staff.  Can you not push it back an hour?

No problems.  6pm it is then.

Inline replies

Critics of top-posting almost invariably prefer replying by trimming the quoted material so that only the relevant parts needed for context remain, and replying underneath each one.

This style is often called "inline reply", "interleaved reply", or "point-by-point rebuttal", though it is sometimes confusingly called "bottom-posting". The request to "trim quotes (leaving only the relevant quoted material)" is a common companion to this, and some refer to this style as "trim-posting".


Or with the words of RFC 1855, the RFC Netiquette Guidelines, which comprise a comprehensive set of netiquette conventions:

If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context. This will make sure readers understand when they start to read your response.

This section of the RFC is discussing public archived postings such as mailing lists and newsgroups. For interpersonal e-mail, the subject line is often sufficient to remind the sender of what was being discussed, and no quoting of any type is necessary to indicate a reply. However, if one is politely addressing points of a conversation, the points discussed should be explicitly stated or quoted inline. This is stated in the RFC regarding interpersonal communication such as email:

When replying to a message, include enough original material to be understood but no more. It is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material.

Some would add that one should also include a blank line in between quoted material and responses to ensure that they are clearly set off from one another. Some mail programs may even try to re-word-wrap entire paragraphs and cause quotes and replies to be jumbled together illegibly if they are not cleanly separated. A common mistake is to leave "tails" of greater-than signs (">") above or below a quoted block, running into the preceding or following paragraph of new material, instead of creating an entirely blank line as a separator.

Some particularly energetic adherents to portions of RFC 1855 end up trimming large amounts.

When the technique of doing a point-by-point reply beneath the text of an original document is applied to news articles, it is known as fisking.

Snipping/trimming

If quoting large sections of discussion, particularly in newsgroup discussions, it is acceptable to trim the message such that only a taste of the original (a reminder) is left — even if this means leaving a sentence hanging. In such a circumstance it is customary to append an indicator, usually in the form of a square bracketed tag to the effect of [snipped] or [trimmed].

If the precise nature of the quote is not immediately apparent from the remaining text, it is polite to include a brief 'subject' text in the bracket, so the original author's words are not misunderstood by readers unfamiliar with the original. 

> On Thursday, Jim wrote:
> When considering the variation in style between the original
> novel and the movie adaptation, it is clear to see that
[snipped...]

Yes, but almost twenty years separates the book and the film.

> The movie clearly adds a sense of menace to the story which
> is not present in the original book.  This is unacceptable
[Darker interpretation pros and cons, trimmed...]

I agree.  The darker tone works well, once one understands 
the two are aimed at different audiences.

Attribution lines

Since quoted material frequently becomes several levels deep, if a relevant point is retained during a discussion, "attribution lines" are commonly used to indicate the author of each part of the quoted material. 

> > Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> > > Do you like top-posting?

> Nancy Nguyen wrote:
> > No.

Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> How come?

Because it messes up the flow of reading.

> What do you do instead?

I prefer to reply inline.

Many mail user agents will add these attribution lines automatically to the top of the quoted material. Retaining these lines as the discussion continues results in this style: 

Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> Nancy Nguyen wrote:
> > Alfred Bartosz wrote:
> > > Do you like top-posting?
> > No.
> How come?

Because it messes up the flow of reading.

> What do you do instead?

I prefer to reply inline.

Double-quoting

One style that seems to be increasing in frequency of usage is one that involves replying in an interleaved manner to selected quotes from the original message, as described above, but then following this with a fullquote of the entire message as with top-posting. This results in some portions of the original message being quoted twice. Some consider this the most wasteful style of all.

The debate

Unsurprisingly, different online communities differ on whether or not top-posting is objectionable; but if it is found objectionable in a particular community, top-posting in that community will generally be seen as major breach of etiquette and will provoke particularly vehement responses from community regulars.

Top-posters generally list the following reasons to support their view:

  • Scrolling down through a post to find a reply is inconvenient, especially for short replies to long posts.
  • Some believe that inline posting should be applied only to threaded discussions such as newsgroups, but defer to "top-sending" for interpersonal e-mail. Proper customer service often requires that all points be addressed in a clear manner that doesn't require any quoting. The original e-mail message is only attached (or included at the bottom) merely as evidence.
  • Especially in business correspondence, an entire message thread may need to be forwarded to a third party for handling or discussion. In this case, it is appropriate to "top-post" the handling instructions or discussion above the quoted message.
  • Many inexperienced computer users don't know about any alternative to top-posting, and may not know to scroll down to find a reply to their query. (When communicating with the public via interpersonal e-mail, one might indicate inline replies with a notice at the top such as "I have replied below.")

Inline/interleaved posters generally list the following reasons to support their view:

  • Inline posting creates a natural, chronological ordering to each segment of the discussion stored within a message.
  • Inline posting promotes the practice of trimming quoted text to prevent signature blocks, free-mail-service ads, and corporate disclaimers piling up in a growing useless "tail" at the end.
  • Inline posting doesn't require the poster to recap each issue being addressed, as comments can be made point-for-point against the original message, making for a more structured, disciplined and unambiguous reply.
  • Inline replies keep related sections of a discussion together within a message. As such it is easier to fork off parallel 'threads' of discussion from a single source message, each perhaps dealing with only one specific point (or subset of points) from the original.
  • Inline posting is the more "flexible and scalable" technology (functionally a superset of top posting) making it a better choice for standardization.

Online debate between the two camps, pro and anti, can become quite fierce. Each side has frequently used rebuttals used against the points listed above. For example, inline/interleaved supporters may respond to the arguments of their opponents with the following:

  • Scrolling down to find the fresh material is generally only a problem if the quoted text has not been appropriately trimmed.
  • Email has long supported a convention for forwarding verbatim entire messages, including their headers. An untrimmed quoted message is a weak form of transcript, as key pieces of meta information are destroyed. (This is why an ISP's postmaster will typically insist on a forwarded copy of any problematic email, rather than a quote.)

Usage

Objections to top-posting, as a rule, seem to come from persons who first went online in the earlier days of Usenet, and in communities that date to Usenet's early days. Among the most vehement communities are those in the Usenet comp.lang hierarchy, especially comp.lang.c and comp.lang.c++. Etiquette is looser (as is almost everything) in the alt hierarchy. Newer online participants, especially those with limited experience of Usenet, tend as a general rule, to be less sensitive to top-posting, and tend to reject any argument against top-posting as irrelevant. A typical contrarian view holds that their software top-posts and they like it.

It may be that users used to older, terminal-oriented software which was unable to easily show references to posts being replied to, learned to prefer the summary that not top-posting gives; it is also likely that the general slower propagation times of the original Usenet groups made that summary a useful reminder of older posts. As news and mail readers have become more capable, and as propagation times have grown shorter, newer users may find top-posting more efficient.

Microsoft has had a significant influence on top-posting by the ubiquity of its software; its e-mail and newsreader software top-posts by default, and in several cases makes it difficult not to top-post; many users apparently have accepted Microsoft's default as a de facto standard. Given that many newer online participants have never used anything but Microsoft tools and only communicated with other users of Microsoft tools, they are completely oblivious to the fact that any other form of email quoting exists.

Perhaps because of Microsoft's influence, top-posting is more common on mailing lists and in personal e-mail. Top-posting is viewed as seriously destructive to mailing-list digests, where multiple levels of top-posting are difficult to skip. It is, moreover, nearly irresistible to post an entire digest back to the mailing list, then top-post a reply to that message.

Finally, top-posting is simply a custom, like wearing neckties or eating with one's right hand, that serves to identify one's membership in a particular community. This self-identification function probably serves as much as any other factor to reinforce its use: one cannot expect much help in comp.lang.c++ if one self-identifies as a "barbarian" by top-posting. In this way, not top-posting is similar to other customs employed by other communities: the Unix community; the various programmer "cultures"; the "New Jersey/Bell Labs", the "MIT/Cambridge", or the "West Coast/Berkeley" "communities"; the AOL "community".

Other meanings

"Top-posting" can also refer to the practice of deleting and re-posting a message (where allowable) so that it appears at the top of a list or index, in order for it to be more visible. (Although it's more commonly called bumping.) Top-posting is a common practice among spammers on free message boards like craigslist.

References

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