From: Matt Armstrong Date: 2001-12-08T01:07:51+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:27816] Re: New RubyGarden Poll - this one affectsus all :) "Conrad Schneiker" writes: > Hi, > > "Yukihiro Matsumoto" wrote: > >> Probably it's a tradition issue. Almost all lists I join add prefix >> to the subjects of their mails. This is quite popular way in Japan. > > Are there any good and/or popular conventions used in the broader English > speaking realm? > > I did a little search-based random sampling (i.e. possibly statistically > anomalous) and turned up some interesting bits of information. > > Notably, "Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links...." (posted > weekly to comp.lang.python) uses references such as > "http://groups.google.com/groups?th=18e6d8363f51b0bc,31" to refer to past > posts. This is notable since others were discussing emulating this cool > weekly news summary service for Ruby. IIRC, like comp.lang.ruby, > comp.lang.python is also mirrored to a corresponding mail list. This is a bad idea, as the google.com archive could go away at any minute, invalidating references to all the old posts. As you quoted in your post (which I have not included here) this happened when the old deja.com archive went down. I am quite annoyed when I find something on the net that claims to explain exactly what I want to know, yet it is full of old deja.com URLs that no longer work. It is MUCH better to have the article itself be tagged with a unique ID somehow by the mailing list software. This way, the message has the same unique ID no matter what archiving service is archiving the list. -- matt