Threading problems

[Ian Goddard]

This is directed primarily at the moderator & Linkpendium.

I've been having a look at the problem of posts being misthreaded when
read by a news client.

When a newsgroup client receives a post it looks at the references, if
any, and looks for a previous post with a message ID matching the latest
reference and threads it under that post.

What seems to be happening is that if a post is made through the the
newsgroup system it gets one message ID when read through the newsgroup
and a different one if read through the mailing list; e.g.
<jc368i$ce5$1...@askin-17.linkpendium.com> vs
<201112112110...@askin-17.linkpendium.com>

If the mailing list user replies it's the latter ID that's quoted as a
reference. However a newsgroup client reading this reply doesn't have
the long reference under which to thread it. What happens next depends
on the whether the mailer sent a list of previous references and whether
the reader can use them.

The Thunderbird/Seamonkey newsreader will work back along a list of
references and thread the message under the most recent reference for
which it has a matching ID. E.g. in there might be a list such as:

<jb86tc$6ql$1...@askin-17.linkpendium.com>
<jbg33v$114$1...@askin-17.linkpendium.com>
<jbipi5$k23$1...@askin-17.linkpendium.com>
<201112112110...@askin-17.linkpendium.com>

in which case the post is threaded under
<jbipi5$k23$1...@askin-17.linkpendium.com> although the intended post was
<jc368i$ce5$1...@askin-17.linkpendium.com>

This means that the reply will be threaded in the correct thread but
under the wrong post in that thread which makes for confusing threads.

However there are two cases where this fails. One is where the mail
client invariably sends the last reference only and the other is where
the mail client sends a full list of references but the reply is to the
first post in the thread. In these cases the news client has no
reference other than the non-matching mail reference so it starts a new
thread.

I've no experience of using the mail-list interface but I'd guess
there's some similar effects found there.

Some groups seem to be operated almost exclusively via news clients and
the disruption is minimal. Some are read by a mixture of news and mail
clients and threads become extensively fragmented, s.g.medieval being
the worst victim IME.

So the bottom line is, is there any possibility of presenting the same
message-ID to both mail list and newsgroups?


[ This is a great bit of analysis. Unfortunately, I'm the only
technical volunteer in all of Linkpendium, so I'm insanely
overcommitted. If I can find time, I will try to crawl inside
of the code (it's all open-source) and see if I can persuade
the news and mail system to use identical message-IDs (and clean
up some other issues of which I am aware ... ) - Mod ]


--
Ian

The Hotmail address is my spam-bin. Real mail address is iang
at austonley org uk

Ian Goddard <godd...@hotmail.co.uk>