Jeopardy

[prog]

The war against Jeopardy-style posting is lost, and has been for a long time. I've only come around to realizing this lately.

I bet that the only people who don't do it are people who still post to Usenet, a set also expressable as people who know what "Jeopardy-style posting" means.

I don't mind, and I still write my replies "correctly" because it's better that way. But I have to accept that nobody will pick up on my example.

Comments

Jeopardy-style == backwards

[taskboy3000.livejournal.com]

Being an old man of the Internet like you, I think you are referring to the rather poor email habit of putting one's reply to an email before the original. The problem with this, of course, is that when you read the last reply, you have no item what the first paragraphs are referring to.

I too piss against this particularly cold wind. I'm afraid "correct" and "polite" will always loose out to "fast" and "easy."

We are a dying breed.

[dictator555.livejournal.com]

Ha. This is especially fun at work when an e-mail has been forwarded down your chain of command to the point where the top messages make no sense whatsoever. It goes something like this:

My Boss: This is a great idea! Implement Part 2 right away.
My Boss's Boss: I agree with what Kathryn said. Let's do what we can.
My Boss's Boss's Boss: wow. these Changes look important. anything that will effect US?
Kathryn: Sir, just wanted to let you know this was in the works. It might be a critical success factor.
Kathryn's Boss: all- take a look at the stuff dave b is doing- could effect the CMO's...
Half and Hour's Reading Later...
Dave B's Lowest Subordinate: Sir, please see the attached spreadsheet. Part A. contains statistics about XYZ. Part 2. is what we might consider doing about it if you think it's a problem.

Note: Half the time the attachment (where the actual information usually is, hasn't made it down the line to me.) How did they do this stuff before e-mail?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

It eliminates context.

> What's wrong with bottom-quoting?

---

I blame Google for caving in to Outlook. Stupid default behaviors. But what we *really* need is intelligent handling of quoted text, so that it can be parsed out and put wherever the *reader* needs it to go so that they can understand it. Honestly it's pretty annoying scrolling to the bottom of a huge, multi-quoted email to find the bit that's relevant to me, and around here, people just leave the last 1000 replies attached as some sort of vestigial tail. I've gotten emails that included quote-tails in which neither I *nor* the sender participated, him and I having been cced into the conversation and not bothered to trim the excess. So annoying, and sometimes harmful. ("Hey, Bob, you should answer this email from our annoying customer!" Oops.)

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean -- it can be really hard to figure out what the heck has transpired or attempted to be communicated in a typical outlook e-mail. I live in dilbertville, after all. Undfortunately, now you've got the Weird Al song "Jeopardy" stuck in my head.

[lediva.livejournal.com]

So it doesn't mess up the flow of reading.
> How come?
> > I prefer to reply inline.
> > > What do you do instead?
> > > > No.
> > > > > Do you like top-posting?

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

Not having used Usenet in a few years, I had to ponder for a while on Jeopardy-style posting. Very amusing -- I hadn't heard that one.

It is, of course, entirely the fault of the popular mail readers, on Windows and on the web. In Outlook, it's actually *harder* to write replies "properly".

That said, replying at the bottom isn't necessary with a mail reader that supports threading--you get all the context in the posts above and bottom-replying means your reader has to scroll down over stuff they've already read.

[keimel.livejournal.com]

Like others who commented, I think it has a lot to do with software default behavior. I mean, if all those apps drop your cursor in above all the quoted text, very few people are going to take the time to reply properly.

What's really bad is reading a digest where some people trim, some do not, some jeopardy reply, some do not. It really makes life on the reader hell.

I too share your frustration with this not so subtle change in the flow of communication.

Now, about the war on HTML email... I think small victories can be won. I just had someone change his email config when I told him that his 6 line reply was over 300 lines long due to html.

But I digress...

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

I have important co-workers who take it one step further into incomprehensibility: they respond with a new message at the top that says only "see my responses added below" and then they edit the quoted text with new responses and comments, usually offset by using a different text color. Going back after the fact and reconstructing the flow of a conversation then becomes quite difficult.

[greenlily.livejournal.com]

Is that what it's called? It drives me nuts too, especially on work-related questions. Reading the answer before the question only means my reaction to the question is going to get diluted.

[prog.livejournal.com]

As other commenters have reminded me, it's also (and more succinctly) known as top-posting. I learned the snarkier name first, I think.

[temvald.livejournal.com]

though, to be fair, getting a response to a 10-page email with a one-line reply at the very bottom is also pretty annoying.

[prog.livejournal.com]

That's just upside-down top-posting, then.

Part of the etiquette I'm referring to is trimming quoted lines that your reply does not address.

[daerr.livejournal.com]

I think some of the resistance to trimmed quoted replies comes from some GUI mail programs inability to reflow text. This has probably been solved for several years now: I note that Mail.App seems to have solved this. This would be especially hard for something like gmail.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Consider yourself fortunate that enough of your e-mail makes sense for this kind of thing to matter. My typical experience involves corporate e-mail exchanges that are so cryptic/incomprehensible/incoherent that where or if anyone replies is pretty much irrelevant.