Editing Posting style (section)

===Choosing the proper posting style===
{{More citations needed|section|date=May 2024}}

The choice between interleaved, top and bottom posting generally depends on the forum and on the nature of the message. Some forums (such as personal e-mail) are quite tolerant, in which case the proper style is dictated by taste and effectiveness. One should consider whether the reply will be easily read by the intended recipient(s). Their e-mail interfaces may have different rules for handling quoted line markers and long lines, so a reply that looks readable in one's screen may be jumbled and incorrectly colored on theirs. Blank lines and judicious trimming of the original text may help avoid ambiguity.

The interleaved reply style can require more work in terms of labeling lines, but possibly less work in establishing the context of each reply line. It also keeps the quotes and their replies close to each other and in logical reading order, and encourages trimming of the quoted material to the bare minimum. This style makes it easier for readers to identify the points of the original message that are being replied to; in particular, whether the reply misunderstood or ignored some point of the original text. It also gives the sender freedom to arrange the quoted parts in any order, and to provide a single comment to quotations from two or more separate messages, even if these did not include each other.

Top- and bottom-posting are sometimes compared to traditional [[letter (message)|written correspondence]] in that the response is a single continuous text, and the whole original is appended only to clarify which letter is being replied to. [[Customer service]] e-mail practices, in particular, often require that all points be addressed in a clear manner without quoting, while the original e-mail message may be included as an attachment. Including the whole original message may be necessary also when a new correspondent is included in an ongoing discussion.<ref>[http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/top-posting.html Quoting: Top Posting]—Dan's Mail Format Site</ref><ref>[http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200509/sensible_email/ Sensible email] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061017180623/http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200509/sensible_email/ |date=October 17, 2006 }}—Blog post and discussion</ref> Especially in business correspondence, an entire message thread may need to be forwarded to a third party for handling or discussion. On the other hand, in environments where the entire discussion is accessible to new readers (such as [[newsgroup]]s or [[online forum]]s), full inclusion of previous messages is inappropriate; if quoting is necessary, the interleaved style is probably best.

If the original message is to be quoted in full, for any reason, bottom-posting is usually the most appropriate format—because it preserves the logical order of the replies and is consistent with the Western reading direction from top to bottom.

It is not uncommon during discussions concerning top-posting vs. bottom-posting to hear quotes from "Netiquette Guidelines (RFC 1855)". While many RFCs are vetted and approved though a committee process, some RFCs, such as RFC 1855, are just "Informational" and in reality, sometimes just personal opinions. (Additional information on "Informational" RFCs can be found in RFC 2026, under "4.2.2 Informational" and "4.2.3 Procedures for Experimental and Informational RFCs".) The nature of RFC 1855 should be considered while reading the following discussion.

According to RFC 1855, a message can begin with an abbreviated summary; i.e. a post can begin with a paraphrasing instead of quoting selectively. Specifically, it says:

{{blockquote|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. Since NetNews, especially, is proliferated by distributing the postings from one host to another, it is possible to see a response to a message before seeing the original. Giving context helps everyone. But do not include the entire original!}}

Interleaved reply combined with top-posting combines the advantages of both styles. However this also results in some portions of the original message being quoted twice, which takes up extra space and may confuse the reader.

In forwarding it is sometimes preferred to include the entire original message (including all headers) as a [[MIME]] attachment, while in top-posted replies these are often trimmed or replaced by an [[#Attribution lines|attribution line]]. An untrimmed quoted message is a weaker form of transcript, as key pieces of meta information are destroyed. (This is why an [[Internet service provider|ISP]]'s [[Postmaster (computing)|Postmaster]] will typically insist on a ''forwarded'' copy of any problematic e-mail, rather than a quote.) These forwarded messages are displayed in the same way as top-posting in some mail clients. Top-posting is viewed as seriously destructive to [[Electronic mailing list|mailing-list]] digests, where multiple levels of top-posting are difficult to skip. The worst case would be top-posting while including an entire digest as the original message.

Some believe that "top-posting" is appropriate for interpersonal e-mail, but inline posting should always be applied to threaded discussions such as newsgroups.

This example is occasionally used in mailing lists to mock and discourage top-posting:<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/mailinglists/etiquette.php|title=ARM Linux - Mailing Lists - Etiquette|work=linux.org.uk}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.idallen.com/topposting.html|title=Top Posting and Bottom Posting|work=idallen.com}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://what-is-what.com/what_is/top_posting.html|title=What is Top Posting?|work=what-is-what.com}}</ref>

 Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
 Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
 Top-posting.
 What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

Bottom-posting preserves the logical order of the replies and is consistent with the Western reading direction from top to bottom.

The major argument against bottom-posting is that scrolling down through a post to find a reply is inconvenient, especially for short replies to long messages, and many inexperienced computer users may not know that they need to scroll down to find a reply to their query. When sending an untrimmed bottom-posted message, one might indicate inline replies with a notice at the top such as "I have replied below." However, as many modern mail programs are capable of displaying different levels of quotation with different colors (as seen in the [[#Bottom-posting-example|bottom-posting example]] on this page), this is not so much of an issue any more. Another method to indicate that there is more reply text still to come is to always end your text with a signature line. Then a reader who is familiar with your reply style will know to continue to read until your signature line appears. This method is particularly polite and useful when using the inline reply method, since it tells the reader that your response is complete at the point where your signature line appears.