On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 21:14,
I know its a rule, but I think it is dumb. My phone does not even support botting posting for example, does that mean I'm not allowed to post to this newgroup? my guess is that it started off with a few people wanting to separate themselves from others by usage of arbitrary rules in order to obtain some form of "l33tn3$$" without having actually considering the merits or lack thereof ubtil after their motives were question in which scenario artificial ones were created to support the habbit.
Perhaps it's designed in part to increase post quality by making people post from full-fledged email clients where they're more likely to consider their responses and less likely to omit apostrophes/capitalization/spelling. Regardless, the rules have served well so far, and thus are unlikely to change just for someone who doesn't want to develop "botting posting habbits [sic]".
There has been the argument that if you were ob a forum that they go by bottom posting but again modern mail clients support threading anyways, and I don't know about you, but I can't recall the last time I was reading a forum and every post included included the entirety of the posts to the thread prior.
Nor should a post to this message group. That's covered under "Don't Overquote" at the same link that talks about preferring bottom-posting: http://www.boost.org/community/policy.html#effective
Lastly, why would you ever want to pick up a thread by reading the middle of it? Using the forum analogy, one would be hard pressed to find someone whose month was to always read a thread by starting on page 12, so, group by thread and read from the start
Having the necessary -- and no more -- context is extremely helpful when answering an email that just arrived, since most people on the list follow many threads at once. Forcing dozens (or more) readers to all search for the context is far less efficient and far more error prone than just having the sender make it clear. Again, the same link says something similar, under "Well-Crafted Posting is Worth the Effort": http://www.boost.org/community/policy.html#effective