>From: pschleck
>Path: pschleck
>Date: 24 Apr 95 05:10:21 GMT
>Message-ID: <pschleck.798700221@gonix>
>From: pschleck@gonix.com (Paul W Schleck KD3FU)
>Organization: Greater Omaha Public Access Unix
>Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
>Subject: Re: Threading news.answers
>References: <3n7ua0$172@miranda.gmrc.gecm.com>
In <3n7ua0$172@miranda.gmrc.gecm.com> cmd@gmrc.gecm.com (Chris Dearlove) writes:
>I'm not sure if this is the best place to post this, but it is a
>miscellaneous question about the news hierarchy.
This newsgroup was probably a reasonable choice, although the
faq-maintainers@mit.edu mailing list (or even writing the *.answers
moderators at news-answers-request@mit.edu) would be more likely to have
readers knowledgeable about this specific subject.
>I subscribe to and browse news.answers using tin. It would be a
>significant imrovement if the various multiple part FAQs were
>each posted as a single thread. This applies both to those I am
>interested in and those I am not. Is this a possible, and if so
>does anyone else agree with me? I should add that this is not
>meant as a criticism of the moderator in any way.
>[The same may apply to the other *.answers groups, but I don't
>subscribe; in fact one of the advantages of news.answers is
>access to FAQs for groups we don't take, such as the entire
>rec hierarchy - this is a company feed, though this is not
>their opinion.]
They *are* usually posted as a single thread (at least those that are
posted using the auto-faq or post_faq software). However, newsreaders
seem to disagree on what a "thread" is. For example, tin and nn
consider a "thread" to be a set of messages with the exact same Subject
line. In contrast, trn and a few other newsreaders consider a "thread"
to be any set of messages in which the References and Message-ID headers
are linked to one another. Since all multi-part FAQ's have differing
Subjects, they are not a thread in the tin/nn sense of the word.
However, they are a thread in trn.
For example, the FAQ that I post (the Amateur Radio Elmers Resource
Directory) has 5 parts, with the last 4 containing a References line
with the Message-ID of the first one. While I can traverse this thread
quite easily in trn, tin and nn consider the 5 articles to be completely
different threads.
There really isn't any universal solution to this as the various
newsreader authors are fairly adamant about how their software works and
how they define a "thread." Also, it's just not practical to post
multi-part FAQ's with the same Subject. If you have some choice of
newsreader, you should probably select the one that gives the
presentation that you prefer, which would seem to be those that handle
threads like trn.
-- Paul W. Schleck pschleck@gonix.com
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