My informal observation is that putting the requested [Telecom] marker at the end of Subject: lines in comp.dcom.telecom postings (and nowhere else) is helping a lot in making the list of postings in the newsgroup window easier to read.
Potential new Usenet quasi standard here . . . ?
***** Moderator's Note *****AES,
I invite you to submit an RFC: I'm too old. ;-)
Bill Horne Temporary Moderator
(Please put [Telecom] in the subject line of your post, or I may never see it. Thanks!)
Nope. For those who use, and know how to configure, _competent_ newsreader software, it makes absolutely no difference.
The information in the 'References' header is sufficient to properly 'connect up' messages in sequence _regardless_ of what 'mayhem' occurs on the subject line.
If _your_ newsreader doesn't do that, then the 'fix' for the issue is for
*you* to 'get a better newsreader', _not_ for the rest of the world to change to accommodate the borken-ness of your newsreader.Headers indicate you're using MT-newswatcher on a Mac. In which case, it isn't borked, just mis-configured.
All you have to do is change the threading preference to 'By References', and you'll get the 'better' behavior -- *regardless* of where the magic word appears on the subject line.
Many of us utilize public library computers and do not have control over the software they use.
You're not even using a newsreader, at all. Just Google's p*ss-poor excuse for a web-based interface to USENET. A number of pay providers offer much better interfaces. including much better selectivity, filtering, and organization choices.
"You get what you pay for" applies.
To use an old line, it is just choosy about who it makes friends with.
The keyboard-based interface -- and trying to keep things, wherever possible, to single key-strokes -- does limit things somewhat, but once you're over the initial learning curve, it is amazingly _effective_ at what it does.
You're being rude.
No one is demanding "the rest of the world _change_".
Please remember there is a cost for someone's classes, hardware, software, and lost time from work to get said education necessary to meet your expectations.
That sounds arrogant.
***** Moderator's Note *****
I must admit that this is a sensitive issue for me. The world of computers constantly changes, always has faster than other technologies. But as the installed user bases grows, it means people get left behind. Not everyone has the resources to constantly upgrade their machines, software, and skillset to be compliant with the latest 'standards', yet many people in the industry strongly expect that. Some of those people are businesses that have a selfish interest in selling new products, and some of technies who want the latest stuff because they're bored with the old stuff.
Let me point out that back in the 1960s IBM realized it had to provide high-speed compatabiilty with its earlier machines in order to sell System/360. It did so and that was a major reason S/360 was a huge success. (Also, people kept their old 1401 software running for as long as 40 years!) Today we have dingbats who proclaim the mainframe, COBOL, CICS, etc., are "obsolete", implying it should be rewritten AT ONCE. This ignores the enormous investment in software and training that companies have made and the costs to convert.
Another example: I have a 2500 Touch Tone phone that is 30 years old and works perfectly fine. But there are those out there who want to make it obsolete and force me to make my voice calls via VOIP.
I am annoyed that I can drive a 15 year old car perfectly well anywhere, but a much younger computer--one not subject to the outside weather or road bumps--essenitally won't work after 7 years because it's software will be obsolete with everyone else.
Good point.
***** Moderator's Note *****I'm going to put this thread to bed with this post: there may be more to talk about, but it's not something that applies to telecom.
The cause of most friction between the "Old Guard" (I'm one ;-)) and newer Usenet users is not that we Old Buzzards demand the newcomers learn everything we did - although, frankly, there _is_ a bit of "I crawled under the barbed wire, so _you_ should, too" in command-line nostalgia - but, rather, that software manufacturers think it's their job to corrupt every protocol, method, standard, and coding that exists, so that they can create a "data corral" of users who can only see Entertainment/News/Music/Whatever that is compliant with the manufacturer's parachial view of the Internet.
We Old Buzzards would be fine with having new features in places that welcome them - alt.binaries.pictures.* couldn't exist without base64 coding - but software manufacturers are constantly attempting to privatize the public protocols which made the Internet possible, by the famous "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" method that Microsoft's executives revealed in the anti-trust trials.
The result is software, be it an Internet browser, a news reader, or an email client, which either utilizes new, non-standard encodings such as quoted-printable, or forces both text and HTML in every post, or depends on non-standard data encoding such as Windows-1259, or does two or all three at the same time. It's doesn't play well with the old Unix-based tools because it was designed to break them and force everyone, everywhere, to pay tribute to Microsoft.
We Old Buzzards don't want to pay. We disagree with those who are willing to acquiesce to M$'s power grab, but the nub of it is that those who learned Microsoft's way of doing things don't want to change and neither do we.
It's an imperfect world.
Bill Horne Temporary Moderator
(Please put [Telecom] at the end of the subject line of your post, or I may never see it. Thanks!)
Sure you do, you can run anything that is downloadable as a Java applet, most things that you can download over the web, and you can log into a remote machine with ssh or telnet and use anything there.
Lots of folks will offer you a free shell account if you want to log in remotely, or you can pay Panix ten bucks a month for the best shell service I have ever used.
It's a hell of a lot more user-friendly than the horrible Google interface, and much, much faster. And you won't have to deal with the incompetent people who run Google who are unable to deal with their spam problems and who offer zero customer service.
--scott
He's making an observation that the more significant words on Subject should be as close to the beginning as possible. Longer subject headers tend to bleed off the screen.
I'll second his observation, that putting the tag at the end of the line and not the beginning is a decent accomodation, helping to make the Subject header more useful while accomodating our moderator's kludge.
He's made an excellent point, and a good argument that should gain your cooperation. So how 'bout it?
He's not making a threading observation, which I agree is based on the string of Message-ID's in the References header. (You forget that this is a gated newsgroup to an email digest, so readers aren't exclusively using newsreaders but mailers as well. References headers aren't a requirement of mailers, although they've become a somewhat common feature.)
***** Moderator's Note *****Since the Digest is distributed to email customers via a Majordomo robot, the "[Telecom]" header is sometimes at the start of a line, since that's where the Majordomo software puts it. I don't think we can change that, but John Levine is checking on it.
Threading information is sometimes lost because readers who receive the Digest instead of individual emails don't have access to it.
Bill Horne Temporary Moderator
(Please put [Telecom] at the end of the subject line of your post, or I may never see it. Thanks!)
Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.