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Thread overview
An observation
May 01, 2012
Russel Winder
May 01, 2012
Gour
May 02, 2012
Maxim Fomin
May 02, 2012
Tobias Pankrath
May 02, 2012
Sean Kelly
May 02, 2012
H. S. Teoh
May 03, 2012
Tobias Pankrath
May 03, 2012
H. S. Teoh
May 03, 2012
Regan Heath
Broken newsgroup threading (was: Re: An observation)
May 05, 2012
Jeff Nowakowski
May 05, 2012
H. S. Teoh
May 01, 2012
I got to a point of pain with the "Re: How can D become adopted at my company?" thread so I thought I would say something.

This list often has threads that go to 300-400 contributions or more. After about 20-25 contributions the topic completely changes and is often completely unrelated to the subject.  Quite quickly I think TL;DR and so simply delete all future messages on that thread even though this means more than likely missing good contributions. The mis-match of subject and topic of the contained contribution is impossible to deal with, so I think why bother? If people would change the subject field and/or switch to a new thread with a new subject, it would enable much easier appreciation of the content, and hence more likely contribution.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder


May 01, 2012
On Tue, 01 May 2012 15:46:56 +0100
Russel Winder <russel@winder.org.uk> wrote:

> This list often has threads that go to 300-400 contributions or more. After about 20-25 contributions the topic completely changes and is often completely unrelated to the subject.  Quite quickly I think TL;DR and so simply delete all future messages on that thread even though this means more than likely missing good contributions. The mis-match of subject and topic of the contained contribution is impossible to deal with, so I think why bother? If people would change the subject field and/or switch to a new thread with a new subject, it would enable much easier appreciation of the content, and hence more likely contribution.

Very true. I also have to ignore such threads consuming too much time.

Interestingly, the same point was today mentioned on #d and my observation is that among all the mailing lists which I follow (via Gmane), only wxwidgets-devel archive (which, btw, contains every comment from the tracker) is close in size to d.D. (wx-devel ~135K messages since year 2000 and d.D has ~160K messages since 2004).


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
It is far better to discharge one's prescribed duties, even though faultily, than another's duties perfectly. Destruction in the course of performing one's own duty is better than engaging in another's duties, for to follow another's path is dangerous.

http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: 52B5C810


May 02, 2012
On Tuesday, 1 May 2012 at 14:47:19 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> I got to a point of pain with the "Re: How can D become adopted at my
> company?" thread so I thought I would say something.

Good.

>
> This list often has threads that go to 300-400 contributions or more.

Good too.

> After about 20-25 contributions the topic completely changes and is
> often completely unrelated to the subject.

Neither true in general nor in the particular case. Although discussion deviated a little bit from the topic, I found it very useful. Many people have their own ideas what to do with D in which direction, and information sharing is the first step to understand what D is and what it will be in future.

> Quite quickly I think TL;DR
> and so simply delete all future messages on that thread even though this
> means more than likely missing good contributions.

For those, who didn't followed discussion it may be TL;DR, but what about contributors? Even erroneously published posts are not deleted and I expect nobody would bother to moderate things that are even not obvious off-topic.

> The mis-match of
> subject and topic of the contained contribution is impossible to deal
> with, so I think why bother?

Actually many people bothered to read and to answer (likely to be a majority). In fact they bothered so much, that such big threads are very few. It is unacceptable to delete discussions because somebody TL;DR.

> If people would change the subject field
> and/or switch to a new thread with a new subject, it would enable much
> easier appreciation of the content, and hence more likely contribution.

And this is a good advice.
May 02, 2012
Maybe we should just start to use a forum software where threads can be moderated.


May 02, 2012
On May 2, 2012, at 3:04 AM, "Tobias Pankrath" <tobias@pankrath.net> wrote:

> Maybe we should just start to use a forum software where threads can be moderated.

Usenet can be moderated too. It's just work for somebody.
May 02, 2012
On Wed, May 02, 2012 at 07:41:54AM -0700, Sean Kelly wrote: [...]
> Usenet can be moderated too.
[...]

Yikes! When I read that I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. Usenet? Moderation? Wow...

Anyway, back on topic, I have this suspicion that a lot of the complaints about the forums is due to not using a forum/mail reader that has adequate threading facilities.

I use Mutt, and I have no problem at all following threads that I'm interested in and ignoring threads I'm not interested in. Mutt shows the full thread tree of the discussion, and allows you to delete an entire subthread with a single keystroke, so all you have to do when you see the beginning of an uninteresting thread is to hit D, and it all goes away. Or just navigate past the uninteresting subtree of the discussion. This is within a single discussion, of course. The thread-delete function is also eminently useful for unrelated threads that you aren't interested in: just thread-delete the entire tree with the uninteresting subject line, and you're done. Mutt can also expand/collapse threads so that you don't drown in the sea of giant thread trees. It isn't perfect in this area (ideally it should let you do the same with subtrees) but it's pretty dang good.

Not that I'm advocating Mutt, but I do recommend taking the time to learn to use a threading mail/news reader. It will help you keep up with very high traffic mailing lists/forums, and not just the D forums. (D's forums are relatively tame, comparatively speaking. I've been on mailing lists where traffic is measured in units of hundreds per day. And I used to be subscribed to several of them. Never had a problem keeping up. Just delete tree whenever it's tl;dr. :-))


T

-- 
Elegant or ugly code as well as fine or rude sentences have something in common: they don't depend on the language. -- Luca De Vitis
May 03, 2012
>
> Not that I'm advocating Mutt, but I do recommend taking the time to
> learn to use a threading mail/news reader. It will help you keep up with
> very high traffic mailing lists/forums, and not just the D forums. (D's
> forums are relatively tame, comparatively speaking. I've been on mailing
> lists where traffic is measured in units of hundreds per day. And I used
> to be subscribed to several of them. Never had a problem keeping up.
> Just delete tree whenever it's tl;dr. :-))
>

Does the D newsgroup have broken threading in mutt? In my client
threading breaks often because some answers starts new thread
etc. makes the hole thing useless.
May 03, 2012
On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:07:44PM +0200, Tobias Pankrath wrote:
> >
> >Not that I'm advocating Mutt, but I do recommend taking the time to learn to use a threading mail/news reader. It will help you keep up with very high traffic mailing lists/forums, and not just the D forums.  (D's forums are relatively tame, comparatively speaking. I've been on mailing lists where traffic is measured in units of hundreds per day. And I used to be subscribed to several of them. Never had a problem keeping up.  Just delete tree whenever it's tl;dr. :-))
> >
> 
> Does the D newsgroup have broken threading in mutt? In my client threading breaks often because some answers starts new thread etc. makes the hole thing useless.

To be honest, I don't know. I suspect there's some sort of incompatibility (people tell me that my replies are always broken, but I don't see it, and I do notice some people's replies being out of place). It doesn't happen often enough to be troublesome, though. A subthread may break into two or three, but you can still mass-delete them easily if you're not interested in that particular topic.


T

-- 
It is the quality rather than the quantity that matters. -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca
May 03, 2012
On Thu, 03 May 2012 15:31:25 +0100, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 12:07:44PM +0200, Tobias Pankrath wrote:
>> >
>> >Not that I'm advocating Mutt, but I do recommend taking the time to
>> >learn to use a threading mail/news reader. It will help you keep up
>> >with very high traffic mailing lists/forums, and not just the D
>> >forums.  (D's forums are relatively tame, comparatively speaking.
>> >I've been on mailing lists where traffic is measured in units of
>> >hundreds per day. And I used to be subscribed to several of them.
>> >Never had a problem keeping up.  Just delete tree whenever it's
>> >tl;dr. :-))
>> >
>>
>> Does the D newsgroup have broken threading in mutt? In my client
>> threading breaks often because some answers starts new thread etc.
>> makes the hole thing useless.
>
> To be honest, I don't know. I suspect there's some sort of
> incompatibility (people tell me that my replies are always broken, but I
> don't see it, and I do notice some people's replies being out of place).
> It doesn't happen often enough to be troublesome, though. A subthread
> may break into two or three, but you can still mass-delete them easily
> if you're not interested in that particular topic.

I use the built-in reader for Opera Web Browser and it has correctly threaded your reply.  I see replies out of place a lot too, threads broken into pieces and occasionally a large-ish number of replies all listed at the top level.  I just bash 'm' to mark the thread read and move on.

R

-- 
Using Opera's revolutionary email client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
May 05, 2012
On 05/03/2012 06:07 AM, Tobias Pankrath wrote:
>
> Does the D newsgroup have broken threading in mutt? In my client
> threading breaks often because some answers starts new thread
> etc. makes the hole thing useless.

The broken threading is caused by the Mailman newsgroup to mailing list gateway, as described in this post: http://forum.dlang.org/post/akftpzpkwuoqmfzijhor@dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net

I was looking briefly at this issue recently, as it was getting annoying to follow the large threads in my newsreader, and it seems to me that the Mailman stance of changing the Message-ID is wrong. They claim they are just trying to follow the RFCs by generating their own unique ID, but reading RFC 2822 makes it clear that they are misguided:

"The uniqueness of the message identifier is guaranteed by the host that generates it (see below)."

My comment: In other words, they shouldn't be assuming responsibility for this.

"Note: There are many instances when messages are "changed", but those changes do not constitute a new instantiation of that message, and therefore the message would not get a new message identifier. [..] The addition of such header fields does not change the identity of the message and therefore the original "Message-ID:" field is retained. In all cases, it is the meaning that the sender of the message wishes to convey (i.e., whether this is the same message or a different message) that determines whether or not the "Message-ID:" field changes, not any particular syntactic difference that appears (or does not appear) in the message."

My comment: Making the intention of the Message-ID clear, and in fact by generating a new one they are working against its purpose.

I found two Mailman bug reports with patches regarding this issue:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/266263
https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/496233

I may or may not follow up on this with the Mailman folks. If somebody else wants to feel free.
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