>There have been several discussions on this before. And there were many opinions of which several members seemed adamant about how they were going to post responses. The "polite" protocol would be posting at the end of a message -- hence the name "Universal Thread" and not "Universal Braid". However, I do think those that want to insert messages between paragraphs, at the top, etc., will continue to do so. I only hope they will only do this where it makes sense, and even at that, keep it to a minimum. I do like the idea of "snipping" the top off a long thread, leaving the last paragraph or last few sentences. Then posting the response below that.
Mark,

I am all for snipping the thread. All of the messages are here to read and they are presented in a heirarchy to be navigated in their sequence. When a long thread gets alot of responses I find myself scrolling through pages of stuff to get to the meat of the new message and it can be irritating, to say the least.

I also like to take those threads where someone asks three of four questions and repsond to the questions individually with the question quoted just before the answer.

It is just time wasting to see a dozen messages in a thread and have everyone of them start with an entire summary of all previous messages. I would vote for putting the most recent response at the top so it is unnecessary to reread all of the previous messages to find out what the new information is, that is if we feel that keeping the entire thread quoted in the response is appropriate.

My newgroup software barks at me if more than 30% of my message is a quote from the previous message.