Message from discussion
How to curtail top posting !!
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Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 23:04:39 +0000
From: VinceH <s...@softrock.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.misc
Subject: Re: How to curtail top posting !!
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On 17 Jan 2006, Steve Hodgson wrote:
I'm not waiting two and a half months to reply to this... ;-)
> I don't mean to be in any way inflammatory, but I have always
> been curious why this particular group is more offended than
> most by top-posting. Are there any technical reasons associated
> with the client software available or is more historical than
> anything else?
It's technical.
There's a 'feature' in the system, relating to the way it handles
disc partitioning. Specifically, the end of a partition is marked
by a particular sequence of characters on the disc.
Unfortunately, this was all devised before mass take up of the
internet, so this problem wasn't forseen...
A top posted reply causes a very specific group of characters to
appear in a post, and that group matches the end of partition
marker. The unfortunate result is that when that post is commited
to disc, those characters are thereafter [mis]interpreted as
marking the end of a partition.
So, if someone has (say) a 20GB disc, with only 1GB of data on it
and receives a top posted reply, thereafter that disc will be seen
as having only a 1GB partition, due to where the post is put on
disc, and the other 19GB can no longer be used.
This is one of the reasons why, for example, back in the early
Argonet days, one of our number patched the newsreader to work
with the RAM disc; it neatly bypassed the problem (the RAM disc
can't be partitioned, so an end-of-partition marker is
meaningless).
Other more modern solutions include Druck's DiscKnight, which can
be set to routinely scan for erroneous end-of-partition markers,
and in Druck's personal version will then read the surrounding
file and automatically send his standard "please don't top-post"
email to the poster.
Honestly. It's all true. Would I lie about something like this?
;-)
VinceH
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