[Rhodes22-list] What's a Thread?

[Peter Nyberg]

Discussion threads are an interesting topic.  I looked into this a bit while working on the web based interface for the email list that will some day show up on rhodes22.org. 

I'm pretty sure that the email list archives are created by a piece of software called 'Pipermail'.  This is different from, but somehow integrated with the 'Mailman' software that manages the core email list functionality. 

The short answer to Roger's question is 'no'. (That's actually the long answer too.)  Pipermail is a black box, and as far as I know, there's no way to influence what it will do, or to undo what it has already done.

The thing I figured out about Pipermail, is that it knows if a new email is a reply to an old email, and if it is, it will put it in the same thread as the original email.  It must get this information from the usually invisible header data.  I once started what I intended to be a new thread by opening a recent post in my email client, stripping out 100% of the contents, entering new text, and changing the subject.  Pipermail plunked it right into the middle of an existing thread on an entirely different subject.

Your email client program makes it's own decisions about what emails belong in a common thread (if it attempts to do threading at all).  The one on my Mac desktop appears to rely on a random number generation based algorithm.

When I decided that I wanted to include the concept of threads in the new (as yet unseen) web based forum interface, I had to decide how to go about it.  I decided to use the subject line and a time cut-off.  I can't remember the exact details, but if a new posting has a subject line that is similar to (ignoring case and extra spaces) the subject line of another message posted recently (about a month), it becomes part of the same thread. 

No criteria will ever be perfect.

--Peter

> On 2021-10-20, at 16:30:20 EDT, ROGER PIHLAJA wrote:
>
> Peter,
> 
> Is there a way to move individual e-mails from one thread to another in the 
> archives?  That was why I mentioned at the end of my response to Wilson (1st 
> Time) regarding the cleat for the backstay adjuster that the post really 
> belonged in the “Go Faster” or the  “Furling Headsail Replacement” threads. 
> 
> Roger Pihlaja
> S/V Dynamic Equilibrium
>