Paul Dodd wrote on Friday, 29 January 2010 8:39 AM:
> Most people select "Reply all" when replying to existing posts. The
> main thing is that you include in the list
> of recipients if you wish your reply to appear in the mailing list.
> Similarly, when writing a new post, make sure you send it to
>
I made the point recently that when people using digest mode reply, they have
to manually create it, which breaks the threading shown in the archives. This
seems to have had a good reaction, and I'm glad to hear some people have
already swapped over from digest mode as a result. Another point worth noting
is that the reverse can happen - if you Reply All to a random message purely to
obtain the correct mailing address for a new thread, then the new thread will
be shown in the archives as being part of the chosen random thread.
This appears to be a smaller problem than the broken threads, but it does
happen regularly and makes the archives harder to work with.
It's well worth the trouble to add to your address
book so you can easily start new threads from scratch.
Just in case the word "thread" that has been bandied about is new for some
people, I'll explain what it means. If someone posts a message, and several
people reply about it, then several others reply to those replies, etc, the
resulting collection of postings about the same topic are often called a
thread. Threads are represented in the archives as a list of postings arranged
to show who replied to which prior posting. It does this by arranging each
posting under the posting it is a reply to, and indented a little. Here's an
example:
http://bioacoustics.cse.unsw.edu.au/birding-aus/2010-01/msg00692.html
If you scroll to the bottom of that page, you'll see a list of the first 22
postings in that thread.
Computer geeks might call the way it displays the postings as a tree, others
might see it as a wiggly list.
That thread listing shows how Clair started the recent thread about
birding-aus, then I and a few others replied, then Chris and Helen replied to
my reply, and others replied to their replies, etc. Unfortunately the archives
don't seem to be able to show the whole very long thread, you have to click on
Next in Thread to see more.
Interestingly, you can see an example there of an unrelated reply where Debbie
appears to have replied to Trevor's posting to start a thread about
spotlighting. It hasn't indented Dave's reply properly under hers - I suspect
the archives won't show postings as being more than 4 levels deep. (Sorry to
name names, but it's impossible to show examples without doing so, and this
problem isn't common knowledge. Sadly, many of my early postings are
misthreaded like this.)
A final example:
http://bioacoustics.cse.unsw.edu.au/birding-aus/2010-01/msg00698.html
This is where David created a new thread related to the forum thread by
creating an email from scratch instead of replying. Anyone using the thread
list to read through this stuff might miss these postings because they've
formed a separate thread, despite the subject line being similar. The archives
look at message-ids hidden in the email headers, not the subject lines.
Peter Shute==============================www.birding-aus.org
birding-aus.blogspot.com
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