Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: List of sites with broken Followup (No References) Software
Message-ID: <3231@looking.UUCP>
Date: 11 May 89 03:34:43 GMT
References: <3222@looking.UUCP> <649@marob.MASA.COM>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 28

I think most of us understand the reasons for these messages, however it is
the results that are important.

I came upon this because I wrote a filter that could kill based on message-id.
The idea was, when you want to kill a topic, you record the Message-id at the
start of the References line.  This is supposed to be the ultimate parent
or original article.

Then I started reading.  A boring topic would come up.  I killed it in this
way.  Lo and behold, it would come up again.  I would kill it.  It came up
again, I would kill it again, and again, and again, and again, until I got
tired and went back to killing by the subject string.

We can't treat these as base notes, and as long as even a tiny minority
of posters post followups in this way, any thread-follow or topic kill
scheme simply doesn't work.

We will have to rely forever on Subject lines, leaving us forever with the
curse of completely meaningless subject lines.   Ideally, the References
line should do all the work.   Each article should have a different subject
that says what that article is actually about.

Perhaps I was being a bit nasty with the word 'broken.'  Many sites
in my list normally follow-up correctly, but miss from time to time.  Many
problems are well known things like mail gateways.  But the reasons and
motives don't matter here.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473