[SOT] Fast typing and threading...

[James Wilkinson]

Ed Greshko wrote:
> 1.  If one wishes to change the name of a topic it is not sufficient to
> simply reply to a given topic and change the subject.  The headers in the
> reply to the original topic will remain intact and will not be broken into a
> separate thread by some/most (I didn't take a survey) mail readers.

Is this actually desired, though?

Sometimes it will be -- a correspondent may wish to take one throwaway
line and effectively start a new topic based on that concept. In such a
case, a new thread might be the Right Thing.

But usually, a topic will drift over a number of posts. My experience is
that on most forums the subject will drift and only some time later
someone will think to change the subject line.

In this case, deliberately breaking the thread is *not* what is wanted,
since it will separate the drifted topic into two threads -- the
original drifted messages and other responses, and the split topic with
the new title. Usually these will sort some way apart in the subject
list, readers will not be aware of the other thread, and you will end up
with related branches of the same conversation in multiple places. This
is usually what the users of threaded e-mail clients *explicitly* wish
to avoid.

Perhaps you would like correspondents to post one short message in the
old thread pointing readers to a new separate thread for the diverged
topic. I have not found this to be accepted practice on mailing lists or
Usenet. Others may feel that simply changing the name of the thread
later (so at least readers can identify that these posts are not on the
original topic and ignore them if they wish) is easier.

James.

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