22-03-2003, 02:32 PM
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Re(2): Seven Biggest Cat Boxes in the County
(Glenna Rose) writes:
Let me say up front that none of the following should be interpreted
as a criticism of you personally. Your posts are always well-written
and interesting, and that's what's most important. In almost ten
years of regular Usenet usage, I've never seen this particular problem
before, so I'm curious about it, not offended. If you'll tell us the
name and version number of your newsreader, I'd be glad to help if I
can.
I do click "Reply." The administrator of our service has tried to
find out what the problem is but my replies show up in the same
thread for him, not broken as several people here have said.
What's happening is that somewhere along the line your posts are
losing the References header. The References header looks something
like this:
References: fc.003d0941018f677f3b9aca00be29f75f.18f67e5@pmug. org
It contains one or more values, which correspond to the Message-IDs of
its parent posts in the thread. Newsreaders use that info to build
the tree structure of a thread. If a post has no References header,
most newsreaders will assume it's a new thread.
When you asked why I always start a fresh thread, you were making an
assumption which, like assumptions can be, is not fact. When I've
left the subject line the same, or any portion of it, I have clicked
"Reply."
Whether the thread is connected seems to depend on the newsreader
others are using rather than what I am doing. It does not happen on
all newsreaders, though it does happen on Google.
Some newsreaders may seem to thread your posts correctly, but that's
not quite what's happening. What they're doing is seeing an
'orphaned' post -- one that looks like a reply because the Subject
starts with "", but it has no References header -- and sorting it
into the same thread with other posts with the same subject line. But
whether or not your post shows up in contextual order is left up to
chance.
If you do Google searches a lot, you'll see this when a thread has a
very common Subject line like "Help". When showing a thread view,
Google will tend to slap a whole bunch of orphaned posts and
sub-threads together, despite the fact that they have nothing in
common other than having the same subject line and being in the same
newsgroup.
Your administrator should be able to track this problem down pretty
easily, perhaps with a tool like tcpdump, which will track all the
low-level traffic on a connection. By watching the incoming data as
you send a post and the outgoing data when his server passes it
upstream, he can tell when the References header is being lost and
when the (2) is being added to the Subject line.
--
Aaron
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