As for NewsGroup posting preference,
my preference would be NO bottom and NO top ...

Turn off include-message-in-reply altogeter ...

Do NOT hide or delete read messages ...

If a point-by-point response is required,
then copy/paste into the new message ...

Then, conversations would look normal,
since all modern news readers thread messages,
the savings in bandwidth and wasted disk space
both on servers and local news cache would be incredible,
and the news would be much easier to read, search, and
cope with in general ...

I believe the primary reason for the perputration
of including previous messages in replies,
whether they are posted on-top or on-bottom,
is simple convention to days of yore ...

However, I will probably see the proverbial
Snowball in Hades before I will see changes
in NG posting practices ...

--
Cousin Stanley
Human Being
Phoenix, Arizona

| Just like if news servers keep messages forever...

JanC ...

The experience that I have with different news servers is limited
but I have encountered a few that had very short message retention
lifetimes and often original message posts would not be shown ...

Fortunately, the limited number of groups that I was interested in
were always available on another server that did retain well
so I just moved on ...

In cases where original posts have been dropped
and only replies available, if needed I can always resort
to Google groups ...

| If you don't like to see the quoted text, you can use a newsreader
| that has the possibility to hide/fold it ...

A post later in this thread metions that XNews has this capability ...

I used XNews for several months a couple of years ago,
but didn't really care for it, and didn't realize at the time
that quoted text could be hidden ...

I may have to take another look ...

--
Cousin Stanley
Human Being
Phoenix, Arizona

"Cousin Stanley" <CousinStanley@hotmail.com> schreef:

Google doesn't archive all groups and many people use "X-NA: Yes".

AFAIK some other newreaders can do it too...?
Or otherwaise they often have a "skip quoted" key (Xnews has both).

menu View -> Show Quoted Text (it's an on/off toggle)

--
JanC

"Be strict when sending and tolerant when receiving."
RFC 1958 - Architectural Principles of the Internet - section 3.9