For reference: on netiquette

Friday, 22 Apr 2005

Perry Lorier:

I get sick of people sending me email with colours that make my eyes bleed. I hate people who send me email in random fonts that they’ve found on the internet that make me guess what they are trying to say. I have grown a healthy feeling of rage at people who think that I really wanted to download that 600MB image of themselves for their sig.

The argument in poignant summary, for future reference: “sending plaintext email is respectful and courteous.”

I need to do a better job of remembering this core statement. I tend to get into long drawn out arguments (aka flamewars) over issues like this one, unwinding the subject from scratch to deduce the same conclusion anew every time over, during the course of much heat. It is a general problem of mine, making me seem far more dogmatic, rather than reasoned and reasonable, than I am.

And in that spirit, a poignant summary of why top-posting is bad:

A: Because it reverses the normal flow of reading.
Q: Why is top-posting bad?