Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!lll-winken!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Tired of bogus subject lines?
Message-ID: <2461@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 16 Sep 89 23:00:35 GMT
References: <2454@auspex.auspex.com> <13666@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 53

>I suggest that one reasonable way to have reference-following handle
>gatewayed groups is to ignore them.  Let it break on 3% of the articles.
>Who cares, it would still work loads better than subject-following.
>Or, you could fall back on subject-following when the references line is
>missing.

I would vote for the latter; I would want articles from a mailing list
folded into a thread, even in the absence of a References: line (I'd
also want articles folded into a thread even if the References: line
isn't properly maintained - the quality of the posting software used
doesn't necessarily correlate with the quality of the posting :-)).

In other words, I'd really like a newsreader that used Reference: lines
if present, but that can cope with them if they're absent - or if they
don't list every single article prior to them on the thread.

For the purposes to which I put subject-following with my present
newsreader - namely, killing threads in which I have no personal
interest - subject-following seems to work pretty well indeed.  I don't
think Reference-following alone would be enough to make a significant
improvement; what I want is a newsreader that can list the *threads* in
a newsgroup, and let me browse through them, and for that the
References: line would be useful - as a way of sorting articles so that
followups are shown after the article to which they're replying, if
nothing else.

With a newsreader like that, the Subject: line *does* contain
information - it identifies the thread.  (No, you can't just say "get
the subject from the original article in the thread"; remember "Orphaned
Response"?  Followups can arrive before the original article, assuming
the original article even arrives in the first place....)  A Summary:
line would also be useful, to identify the contribution of that
particular article to the thread - assuming people take the trouble to
prepare a good one, which they may or may not do; at this point, I'm
unwilling to take for granted predictions about what people will do
until I see whether they actually do it or not. 

The References: line basically doesn't strike me as being that much more
useful than the Subject: line, in the present environment, for grouping
articles into a thread.  Its main use seems to be in 1) sorting articles
based on a (partial) order, so followups are shown after the article to
which they're responding if possible, and 2) following a reference back
to the article to which the current article is following up.
Unfortunately, my current newsreader ("rn") doesn't do either one, as
far as I can tell, and a replacement newsreader that *does* do both of
them would have to do at least as good a job as "rn" of discarding
uninteresting threads to be an acceptable replacement for it.  (It'd
probably also have to let me look at the *threads* in a newsgroup, as
indicated above - with the option of showing me only threads with
articles I've not seen yet, or threads with articles I've either not
seen or marked as "unread" - and then let me open up each thread to see
it, in order to be enough better to provoke me into making the effort to
learn it.)