Re: OT: The joys of email (was: Re: CONLANG/ZBB crossover)

(Sorry about the late reply, I tried switching email clients but my
other one seems to have silently failed to send a few emails I’ve sent,
so retrying.)

John Vertical wrote:
>> Thread internal is what’s being discussed here. Threaded forums do
>> exist;
>
> Yeah, I do kno about them.
>
>
>> This style of forum more-or-less eliminates replies to more than one
>> message in one post, which makes it much easier to follow discussions;
>
> IMO that depends on the style of discussion. It fits when the discussion
> branches hevvily, and each reply is exactly in reply to the arguments of a
> previous poster. But when the discussion remains focused on a central issue,
> i.e. you have similar or related points made by multiple posters, I prefer
> composite replies. Say someone asks help on some subject, let's say hir
> conlang, and receives multiple slightly differing suggestions? If the
> original poster would wish to then think acaps* how the suggestions compare
> and what che's going to go with, there would be no "correct" place at all
> for such a message in a "tree-shaped" discussion. There's no room for synthesis!
Ah, that’s true, and in those circumstances I often think a bit about
which message should be the official reply (even tho the decision isn’t
usually based on anything more than a whim/what came first). In such
circumstances, of course, you could simply reply to your original
message, and in that case you’d be no worse-off than in a normal
subject-based email forum.

> An ordered graph structure would eliminate that problem while being still as
> easy to follo as a tree, but *that* I have never seen actually implemented.
> Most likely because deducing the correct placement of each node would have
> to be done on the basis of the message's contents.
Actually, I suspect it’s probably more because I have *no* idea how
you’d visualise it concisely. A tree view can be done just with a
regular list with an indent, but a graph would probably need to be
full-on 2d. A lot of work for what’s in practice (at least on email
forums like these) a relatively infrequent occurence.

There’s the less-used References header which lists all ancestors, which
an intelligent client could fill-in automatically when you
copy-and-paste from another email, so you wouldn’t necessarily have to
work out where posts came from based on content.

...
> Actually, I believe that's because I'm in nomail but have still been
> replying via email (bit of a story there...) I didn't realize this was
> causing any problems, because the arkives seem to be organized on the basis
> of the subject line alone. I'm sending this one via the listserv interface,
> so that should be different now. Still switching the subject to "OT: The
> joys of email" tho; but hopefully that won't mangle anything?
Changing subjects does nothing, it’s the In-Reply-To header that counts.
Strangely, listserv doesn’t seem to put in on --- although as you
observe the archives are subject-based, so maybe it’s not that surprising.

--
Tristan.

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