ยท Firefoxman wrote:
What is a top post?
It's to put your reply above the thing you're replying to. It's partly an issue of showing consideration for the people you're writing to, and partly a shibboleth of internet culture. See, for example:
http://catb.org/jargon/html/T/top-post.html
Especially on mailing lists, where you may have hundreds or thousands of people reading your message, including people just joining, skipping around, or finding it via search engines, it's considered polite to trim quoted text down to the minimum needed to follow the conversation. Over the last few years, the appropriate amount to quote has shrunk some, probably thanks to ever-growing disks, better threaded mailers, and web-based mailing list archives allowing people to discover context as needed.
William