From: Conrad Schneiker <schneiker@...>
Date: 2002-01-13T13:27:20+09:00
Subject: Re: The Ruby Way

"Chris Reay" <mrchameleon@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Conrad,
>
> "Conrad Schneiker" <schneiker@jump.net> wrote:
> > Hi,
>
> Snip.
>
> > That might be an overly-subtle reference to a thread from a year or so
> > ago. But in any case I suspect that many people will be clueless (as I
> > was not so many years ago :-) about what netiquette violations you
> > were pointing out above and how the more subtle one was caused. Care
> > to write up a brief explanation?
> >
>
> You have just done so in your message, thank you.

Hmm. I don't see mention of the more subtle one, i.e. that caused what
should have been a new thread to be inserted into an existing thread.
(Indeed, I just saw this happening again today. Anyone else notice this, or
is this something else, perhaps a newsreader bug?)

I don't have time to check this out, but my *wild guess* is that someone did
a reply to a message in the mail list and then completely replaced the
subject and content to save having to look up or enter the mail list address
from scratch, not realizing that some internal mail field with threading
info was not reset along with the subject line, thereby messing up threading
for those of us reading the newsgroup side of the mirror in threaded mode.

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about such things can correct or
enlighten me on this.

> Readers may also
> refer to the first message of this thread (that which I referred to in
> my previous message) and/or they may care to read the Ruby FAQ.

However, in the future, new readers (1 month from now, 2 months from now,
...., n months from now) will not know about this, which is why I suggested
some sort of suitably tactful and low key monthly posting on such things.
(While we probably don't want to emulate Randall Schwartz's long weekly
harangues on comp.lang.perl.misc some years ago, they did help enlighten
many people about Usenet netiquette, including myself.)

Conrad