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