I am seeing some anomalies with message threading. without going into detail about the symptoms, first le me ask how does Hyperkitty thread messages? Is it based on the message-id in the header, guaranteed unique, or on the subject header?
I appear to have a situation where people reply to a message, and then probably thinking to start a new thread, change the subject field., and them post. The message goes to the original thread. I cant stop people doing this as it seems the vast majority of people all over just hit reply for most things anyway as they are generally too lazy to start a new mail (drives me nuts).
With this situation, where the subject has apparently been changed, Hyperkitty adds a not to the top of the post "New subject ...' which is what makes me think the message id is involved.
Some of my subscribers say they do this all the time on the old Listserv mailing list and a new thread is started.
Any help would be appreciated. It's difficult fro me to manually ressign the incorrectly threaded replies as there is no parent message to attach them to.
Andrew
- andrew bernard:
first le me ask how does Hyperkitty thread messages? Is it based on the message-id in the header, guaranteed unique, or on the subject header?
See https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322#section-3.6.4 for an explanation of message threading. It is ID-based, the subject header does not factor into it (no matter what Microsoft thinks of this).
-Ralph
Hi Ralph,
This confirms what I would have thought, and what my simple tests show today. I appreciate your post.
So the issue is, how do I stop my users from this practice of replying and changing the subject? I suppose there is no way except education.
Andrew
andrew.bernard@gmail.com writes:
So the issue is, how do I stop my users from this practice of replying and changing the subject?
This is frequently called "thread hijacking." But be thankful that they at least change the Subject! My worry is more people who start in on a completely new subject without doing it, and then complain that they get ignored because they're off-topic for the thread.
I suppose there is no way except education.
That's right. If you had the resources of a major AI lab, you could probably train up a classifier to do the job fairly well, but in practice it's a matter for human judgment. Eg, I know that I frequently change the Subject: several posts after others have, eh, "evolved" the subject into a completely different thing :-), so it's useful to have proper threading across the subject change.[1]
One practice I found effective was to impose moderation on people who just couldn't practice proper netiquette, then reduce moderation frequency to once a week. ;-) A week is probably overkill. :-þ (I happened to be in a period of frequent travel for two weeks and at the beginning of that period there was this jerk.... He learned.) Once-a-day moderation is sufficiently frustrating for most people to be an effective re-education tool.
Steve
Footnotes: [1] There was a day and age *sigh* when educated people would *frequently* change the subject to reflect the subject of the *message* rather than the subject of the *thread*. That's gone the way of traditional inlined replies are going, though.
participants (3)
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andrew.bernard＠gmail.com -
Ralph Seichter -
Stephen J. Turnbull