[plug] [OT] List Posting/Replying

[Bernd Felsche]

Tim White <weirdo at tigris.org> writes:

><span style="flame: false">
>I'm not sure how Thunderbird threads topics but it seems to follow it 
>even with subject changes. It makes me wonder sometimes when I see a 
>message under a thread totally unrelated. Maybe people are replying to a 
>message and changing the subject rather than starting a new message when 
>posting a message to the list. 

If the discussion is "wandering", then that's valid. Up to a point!
It's a matter of relevance.

If the "reply" is used simply to save typing/selecting an address,
then it's just laziness.

>I'm not sure how the archives handle this ether as I haven't had a
>chance to check this but could I just ask people posting a new
>thread/topic/subject to the list?

When any header becomes sufficiently long, it's a problem for the
infrastructure. 

The NNTP (plug.* newsgroups) side may well reject any posting with a
header of over 1000 bytes long as that's a recommendation in the
RFCs. (The justification for that limit is that news historically
propagated through some old iron with arcane architectures and funky
limits; and a header line that was too long would be corrupted.)

I don't know if Cameron has commented out the limit check in the
leafnode2 code. The change would be mostly harmless.

Given a typical Message-ID of about 20 bytes, the depth of the
thread would otherwise be at most around 50. Which is a great deal;
I'm sure that there's some Usenet law that say that once discussions
reach a certain depth, that they have no value but to consume the
time and patience of the participants.
-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
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