Yes, there is a lot of irregularity and this good in my opinion. Each member can choose his/her style or a certain style for a specific message (the best reply style depends (often) on the style/problem of the thread.) Since it's Universal Thread, you already have all previous messages in a good map, so... the thread is already in the map, there's no need to have it once again in each message.

Personally, I prefer to reply at the top. This is because I like to click on each message and see imediately the reply, not to scroll each time tens of rows of quoted messages. This saves me time. For those who consider that this is still too slow, the Universal Thread Navigator is the tool to use.

I know that there are members who like to print threads and keep them in their personal KB and this is the only good reason (IMHO) to prefer the reply at the bottom. But this works only if nobody cuts anything from the quotes and this not the case.

Anyway, it's not a problem of being polite or not! :)

Also, IMHO, it's very good to have some freedom in the style. After all, the solutions are much more important than their position in the message. And it's more important to keep the messages clear than to follow a single-mandatory style.

So, I would vote for reply on top. But I would not try to force anybody to follow this rule. I think that is much worst that there are many messages that give a solution that was already given several times in the same thread, that some members create more than one thread for the same problem without reading the replies they already have, etc. (Usually, if you read 2-3 more messages in a thread, you may see that what you want to say was already said. So, you lose one more minute but save a minute for thousands other members.) This is much more time consuming. Anyway, this didn't become a real problem on UT (yet:)) and I believe that the quality (of information and interface) is much better here than in other newsgroups.

Sorry for this long message. :)

Vlad

>It seems that there is a lot of irregularity with the way that people respond to messages. Some respond before the attached (previous message) text, and some add their message at the bottom. This makes it very difficult to follow a long thread. If everyone can agree, I would like to request that we come to a consensus about the right and wrong way to respond to a message. This way when logging on for the first time in the morning and catching up with a thread that happened in ones absence, it will be easy to read the entire thing from top to bottom. (I guess this is my vote for adding messages to the _bottom_). I find my self counting > signs to find out which message came first, and scrolling up to the top and back down to the bottom to follow a thread. Any input anyone?