Re: META: Longest threads?

On Sunday, May 22, 2005, at 10:55 , Amanda Babcock wrote:

> On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 01:53:57PM -0700, Sai Emrys wrote:
>
>> Looking at the NLF2DWS thread, I see ~105 responses (and that just on
>> the main thread; add another 50 or so for the spinoffs or variants).
>>
>> That seems to be pretty high, compared to the rest I've seen here.
>> What *have* been the highest-response threads, historically? What're
>> the records?
>
> Erm.  I don't know how to find that number, but I'm pretty sure the
> average thread length was a lot longer back in the days that inspired
> the current posts-a-day limit.
Oh yes - I remember those day when it was rare to get less a couple of
hundred mails a day  :=(

There was no way most of us could read them all - so there was a lot
skimming and simply just trashing uninteresting looking subject lines,
just to keep up.

> Ok, just pulled out of a hat by bringing up quasi-randomly a larger-than-
> usual monthly mailspool archive of my Conlang mail, and 4 days into the
> month (May of 2003) found the thread "Weekly Vocab 6", which my threaded
> mailer finds to contain 173 mails (no guarantees that they're all the same
> subject, just that they were created via a "reply" command that uses the
> References: header).
Quite so - there was a reluctance to change subject headers. Sometimes I
would take a peek at a thread I had been trashing - simply because such an
uninteresting topic seemed to be creating so much interest!! Quite often I
would then discover the content of the mail had no relevance to the
subject heading. Occasionally would find something interesting - but more
likely what breakfast cereals were available in the local store, or some
other way-off-topic trivia. At least the 5 mails per day limit has stopped
that  ;)

> If you want to get really really spooky, in my mailbox at least, the
> thread immediately following that one was titled "Not linear written
> forms?",
> although that turns out to have been about something completely different.
That's the trouble with such ill-defined words as 'linear'   ;)

The 'linear' in 'Linear A' and 'Linear B' for example is not used with the
same meaning as in the subject heading of the current NLF2DWS thread.

Ray
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