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David McRitchie
You are using the words "the cause" rather than "a cause" of
mangled threads.
Unfortunately can't test this in the test newsgroups because they
are not archived. But let's see if I can mangle this one by
addin a group and reply only to the added group. I won't
even change the subject title -- don't know what will happen
Google should have a clear reference back to the original
posting, but the groups being changed might confuse it though
unlikely because Google tends to glom together posts from
many newsgroups when it messes up.
So apologies to those in excel.setup who would not see
the beginning of this post we are testing with. It can be
seen in excel.newusers. And to excel.newusers who are not
going to see my direct reply to this reply. It will take about
12 hours before Google Groups picks this up. I'll even
add microsoft.;public.excel which most of us recognize as
begin defunct as it is no longer carried on the MS newservers..
Another cause might be people who turn off archiving in
their question or answers, and I hope no one is doing that.
Same applies to nuking their posts when there were replies
to them.
But the real concern was really cross-posting.
I'll leave your test of starting with multiple groups to you.
---
HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP - Excel [site changed Nov. 2001]
My Excel Pages: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm
Search Page: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/search.htm
"Harlan Grove" <hrl...@aol.com> wrote in message news:0ec401c35136$b583e670$a501...@phx.gbl...
> "David McRitchie" <dmcri...@msn.com> wrote...
> >Are those carefully chosen words to indicate that cross-
> >posting could be a contributor after all. Missing
> >postings certainly is.
> >
> >"Harlan Grove" <hrl...@aol.com> wrote in message...
> >>Google does mangle newsgroup threads, but it's not due
> >>to crossposting or crossposting alone.
>
> Yes, I was being careful. J.E. had mentioned that
> crossposting had caused problems in the past. I haven't
> had any problems with crossposted articles in Google
> Groups' archives, but I wasn't going to dismiss J.E.'s
> claim. However, I did show that the crossposted thread
> that generated that exchange *WAS* available in Google
> Groups in *EACH* of the crossposted newsgroups when
> browsing, and the thread appeared when searching each of
> the crossposted newsgroups individually. That being so,
> it's impossible to claim crossposting in and of itself is
> the cause of fractured threads.
>
> Google Groups does mangle/fracture threads, but it seems
> this is more often than not due to changing subject lines
> (modulo 'Re:' prefixes), follow-ups that don't include all
> the original crossposted newsgroups, and/or file
> attachments somewhere in the thread (Google Groups
> excludes articles with file attachments).
>
> Care to post urls to the head of a fractured thread and to
> one or two branches that Google thinks are new threads?