Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Tired of bogus subject lines?
Message-ID: <15209@looking.on.ca>
Date: 16 Sep 89 06:53:11 GMT
References: <1650@unocss.UUCP> <112@blekko.UUCP> <6120@ficc.uu.net> <2454@auspex.auspex.com>
Reply-To: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 41
Class: discussion

It's actually not that hard to fix.  Just a SMOP.  (Small matter of
programming)

If incoming data from a mailing list has Subject lines linking messages,
map those into proper references.

The gateway, or sites that get from the gateway, or even a large collection
of major sites, simply have to keep a database of current subject lines.
When a message comes along (ie. from a mailing list) that doesn't have
a References line, you look up the subject in the database.  You find
the reference and generate a references line.

It's not a *good* references line, unfortunately.  It will only reference
the root of that tree, but it's better than nothing.

The reverse would also be possible in a usenet that didn't even bother
moving redundant 're:' subjects.  Look at the root and extract the subject
to feed back to the mailing list.

A real tree based system is *great* folks, and if we had one, people would
use it, and if outsiders kept injecting messages without proper threading,
then more and more people would just start doing automatic reject of
such messages.  I know I would except in the groups for which I have the
keenest interest.  I just don't have the time to read messages that people
don't classify well.

In many groups, I think I'm like many.  I type '=', see 30 messages, and if
I don't see a subject that grabs me, I type 'c' to skip 'em all.  Or
I read the group in "new messages only mode."  In that mode, rn only shows
me non-followups, and I have to deliberately un-kill to see the followups.
Then I only see non-followups and followups of messages I tagged as
interesting.

The result?  There may be 7,000 people reading some part of
news.admin, but I bet most messages only get fewer than 1,000 actual readers.

People post on usenet to get an audience.  If the audience goes away,
people will have to learn.
messages only get a very small number o
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473