>........................ by way of 'synopsis' why should the subjectline
>bw held so sacrosanct that we have to have an exchange of messages before
>agreeing to change it? Theres 80 characters or so that could serve very well
>to indicate what one's topic is.
Gary Trujillo replies:
> ...................................... However, if you're replying to
> an existing discussion thread, please avoid the temptation to change
> the subject line unless you see yourself going off in a completely new
> direction, since it's important to keep this line identical so that the
> IGC/APC system will not see it as unrelated to articles already on file
> and thus open up a new topic for it.
I wonder whether IGC/APC looks at the entire subject line or only at the
intitial x# of characters? If the latter, we could have a subject line that
conforms to the thread, with an added few characters to describe something
more peculiar to the particular posting.
Just a thought in passing......
Peter d'Errico
UMass/Amherst
derrico@legal.umass.edu
[ Peter is probably correct - I'd have to check with the IGC techies to
find out. I suppose we could try such a system; the problem I see with
it is that I think people would find it difficult to keep track of how
many characters are significant. It's the sort of thing I as facilitator
could take care of, but I'm not especially anxious to add to my list of
tasks at the moment. The other matter of note is that the usual conven-
tion - in Usenet newsgroups, at least, is to put the new title first in
a subject line being changed:
Subject: new subject goes here (was: old subject goes here)
I suspect the reason some people change subject lines in responses is
that their mail systems do not automatically copy in the subject line
in a form that permits IGC to recognize the subject as identical to one
for an article it already has on file - that is having a "Re:" prepen-
ded to the previous string (unless it already had one). In fact, Peter's
current mailer (which will go away soon when he switches to a new UNIX
machine - yeaaah) likes to prepend "Reply to." It's a real jungle out
there in mailer-land, folks!
I'll post a followup if I learn any more on the subject (no pun intended :-),
but I suspect that few readers of this list really care all that much.
Stay tuned.
--Gary ]