There is a benefit to we regulars who are scanning through threads for ones
for which we might have some potentially helpful advice, or which discuss
tech issues that we are interested in tracking. Because we often attend to
*many* groups, and some of those groups are HUGE, we maintain a short date
limit -- 15 to 30 days, or less. Thus, when we only happen upon a group
every week or two, we can often miss the early days of a thread,
particularly where the issue is a particularly gnarly one, or one that
simply requires days to deal with. Without the early posts of a thread,
we're usually working in the dark, lacking in many details, pretty much
useless to the discussion.

Even if the entire thread is available, if you have to read back through the
thread it's a PITA to scroll lots of repetitive inline and bottom posts to
gather little bits of new data, when scrolling through just one post would
provide the same info *if* the previous content still remained. Of course,
if top-posting were the norm, we'd pretty much only have to read the thread
from the beginning, and it would be a relatively painless process.

--
Gary S. Terhune
MS MVP Shell/User
http://grystmill.com/articles/cleanboot.htm
http://grystmill.com/articles/security.htm

"Ian" wrote in message
...

"Gary S. Terhune" wrote:


Personally, I find both bottom-posting and inline posting to be
frequently
bothersome. Bottom-posting because I often have to scroll past a *lot*
of
content just to see a one-line or one-paragraph response.

Precisely, and in Agent it prevents you from using keystrokes to quickly
flick through postings.

I don't understand why people see the need to repeat entire threads in
every
reply, anyway. What is the point of that?