Re: Please, check subjects... and maintain threading...

On Jul 14, 2007, at 5:56 PM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> I am following accessibility issues for Opera. Among a lot of other  
> other work. I just spent the lunch-break in a meeting reading 36  
> messages (since the weekend began) about table parsing, labelled as  
> if they belonged to an old accessibility thread.
>
> Apart from wasting lots of people's time, this also makes it less  
> likely that *anything* will be read - we have actually withdrawn a  
> senior engineer from this group because the mail volume and poor  
> labelling wastes too much time, which is not a really productive  
> thing to have to do. If your goal is to improve the working of the  
> group, please check whether the subject of your email reflects what  
> you are writing - and remember that there is a good chance there  
> will be 20 responses following that adopt the subject you have, so  
> your entire thread will just vanish into trash otherwise.
>
> (Plus people will be calling down curses on you, and eventually one  
> of them might take effect :) ).

I'm know I've been guilty of this too (I'll try to do better).  
Another thing to watch is threading (as opposed to subjects). This is  
especially important for the archives since those will be around a  
long time. So when replying to messages that arrive in your mailbox  
twice, try to be sure you're responding to the one from the  
listserve. Otherwise it starts a inappropriately fragments the thread.

I guess the opposite of this, that if you are checking your outgoing  
subjects and changing them, it's a good idea to decide whether to  
create a new message rather than replying (or otherwise altering the  
thread related headers if that's easy to do; does anyone recall what  
those are off the top of your head). This will make sure a new thread  
begins with the new subject heading (not that every subject heading  
change calls for a new thread)..

Take care,
Rob

Received on Saturday, 14 July 2007 23:28:17 UTC