OT - the OT tag and the Re bug.

On Mon, 28 May 2007 11:09:00 GMT, "Neil Gould" wrote in
:

I was asking how you arrived at the conclusion that Outlook Express was
one of the apps that "did the wrong thing". As you can tell from the
headers, I'm using OE. Notice that I also modified the subject to include
a couple more colons, which, as you can see, were posted correctly. So...
how was it that you concluded that OE "did the wrong thing"?

The OE bug is generated by the first person using OE
to reply to a post that begins with "OT:" (or any other
combination of letters other than "".

Once you have "" in the subject line, OE ignores the
rest of the line.

The purpose of eliminating non-"Re" strings ending with a colon
at the beginning of a subject line is to get rid of foreign
language equivalents of "". One "Re" at the beginning of
the line is sufficient.

The well-behaved newsreaders evidently check the first
component so that "OT:" remains intact. OE evidently trims
the first component without checking and substitutes ""
for it.

This is an extremely difficult subject to search for, since
the words involved in the concept are so ordinary.

Here's an example of a discussion of the bug/featu

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.autos.toyota/browse_frm/thread/6bd5c4dbbd550a04/f6b23cfc83d72953?lnk=st&q=outlook+bug+usenet+subje ct&rnum=2#f6b23cfc83d72953

http://tinyurl.com/ypdlpd

FWIW, you might want to make a mental note that Jim Logajan
has been around Usenet for a long time. He has undoubtedly
observed the strange splitting of threads in other groups,
as have I, and wondered why it happened. So have those
who are trying to write standards for Usenet news servers
and newsreaders:

http://www.landfield.com/usefor/2004/Mar/index.html

My favorite subject line on that page is " Sv: Ant: Sv: Antwort: ",
although the post itself is not as funny as the subject.
It does show the problem that Outlook's rule is trying to
avoid--the meaningless multiplication of things that
mean "Re".

Marty
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On Mon, 28 May 2007 09:36:29 -0400, "Martin X. Moleski, SJ"
wrote:


The purpose of eliminating non-"Re" strings ending with a colon
at the beginning of a subject line is to get rid of foreign
language equivalents of "". One "Re" at the beginning of
the line is sufficient.


Speaking of OT, Marty, maybe you could drop into rec.arts.books.

Last week someone posted a serious question about when canon law
addressed the issue of clergy carrying deadly weapons. Given the
breadth of your background, it occured to me that you'd have a handle
on that. No one else has responded to the question.

Don

Notice that I also modified the subject to include
a couple more colons, which, as you can see, were posted correctly.

That's not the bug. The bug (and I don't know if OE has it) is that
when a subject line is automatically processed, the automatic processing
strips incorrectly.

I am using Netscape 7.2. It does not have this bug. However, I am
noticing it has a different bug. Everything to the =right= of the
second colon has been stripped. Interesting.

Actually, that might even be the intended operation, since what was to
the right was the "(was..." and maybe the program is stripping that away
to complete the transition to the intended new subject line.

Curiouser and curiouser. I really wish the documentation would indicate
just =what= is supposed to happen.

Jose
--
There are two kinds of people in the world. Those that just want to
know what button to push, and those that want to know what happens when
they push the button.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

On Mon, 28 May 2007 02:18:00 +0000, Jose wrote:

It would be perceived by me if anyone had replied to such a message, if
I followed the "bug" explanation correctly.

Go back to the thread I referenced, view all messages, sort by subject
line. Do you see one set of messages without the OT(colon) prepend and
another set with, probably sorted in different places in the alphabet?

I expect so, but that's because sorting by thread and sorting by subject
are different operations. That they yield different results should be
no surprise.

This is one of those "doctor, it hurts when I do that", "don't do that"
type scenarios.

More, USENET being what it is, someone would have complained about it
in the years I've been doing this.

Ummmm... so?

My point being that this "bug" doesn't seem "common". I'm not sure
whether this is because the subject lines are not being damaged improperly
or because few people sort by subject.


How? I see no such artifact of "screwed up" sorting, and I've been
sorting by thread for quite a while.

Yanno, I don't have a problem with lines longer than 70 characters. My
newsreader wraps them for me. Why should I wrap my lines for other
people?

I don't know; why should you? And even if you do want to do your own
formatting, why 70 characters? It's not like we're using terminals any
longer.

I think you're trying to build some type of comparison, but you're
comparing a relatively obscure bug with something that was actually an
issue Once Upon a Time. I'm not sure what point can be discerned from
this, so I'm afraid you'll need to be more explicit.

- Andrew

I expect so, but that's because sorting by thread and sorting by subject
are different operations. That they yield different results should be
no surprise.

When I didn't know better, I thought that threads were defined by the
subject line. There are advantages to sorting by subject line, and some
readers do not sort by threads unless set to "read all". Including
plonked posts.

My point being that this "bug" doesn't seem "common".

Actually, it is.

Yanno, I don't have a problem with lines longer than 70 characters. My
newsreader wraps them for me. Why should I wrap my lines for other
people?
I don't know; why should you?

Courtesy to those who need that wrap. It's a small thing, but a nice
thing to do.

(Actually, since hard returns are a problem for wrapping readers I'm on
the fence about this one, but I've been asked to wrap so I wrap.)

It's easy to avoid using the colon in subject line prepends. Doing so
makes a better experience for some others. But this is Usenet. Do what
you want. At least now we know what the consequences of the colon are.
I didn't before, and wondered why things got split.

Jose
--
There are two kinds of people in the world. Those that just want to
know what button to push, and those that want to know what happens when
they push the button.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

Recently, Martin X. Moleski, SJ posted:

On Mon, 28 May 2007 11:09:00 GMT, "Neil Gould"
wrote in
:

I was asking how you arrived at the conclusion that Outlook Express
was one of the apps that "did the wrong thing". As you can tell from
the headers, I'm using OE. Notice that I also modified the subject
to include a couple more colons, which, as you can see, were posted
correctly. So... how was it that you concluded that OE "did the
wrong thing"?

The OE bug is generated by the first person using OE
to reply to a post that begins with "OT:" (or any other
combination of letters other than "".

Once you have "" in the subject line, OE ignores the
rest of the line.

Ah. I see. Thanks for the clarification, Martin.

Neil

Recently, Jose posted:

Notice that I also modified the subject to include
a couple more colons, which, as you can see, were posted correctly.

That's not the bug. The bug (and I don't know if OE has it) is that
when a subject line is automatically processed, the automatic
processing strips incorrectly.

I am using Netscape 7.2. It does not have this bug. However, I am
noticing it has a different bug. Everything to the =right= of the
second colon has been stripped. Interesting.

Actually, that might even be the intended operation, since what was to
the right was the "(was..." and maybe the program is stripping that
away to complete the transition to the intended new subject line.

Curiouser and curiouser. I really wish the documentation would
indicate just =what= is supposed to happen.

That *is* interesting.

I don't know that I'd call these "bugs", if they are working as originally
intended. Perhaps the reasons for executing these actions don't match the
expectations of the user, but that is a somewhat different matter.

Neil

On Mon, 28 May 2007 11:51:32 -0500, "Neil Gould" wrote in
:

Recently, Jose posted:

Notice that I also modified the subject to include
a couple more colons, which, as you can see, were posted correctly.

That's not the bug. The bug (and I don't know if OE has it) is that
when a subject line is automatically processed, the automatic
processing strips incorrectly.

I am using Netscape 7.2. It does not have this bug. However, I am
noticing it has a different bug. Everything to the =right= of the
second colon has been stripped. Interesting.

Actually, that might even be the intended operation, since what was to
the right was the "(was..." and maybe the program is stripping that
away to complete the transition to the intended new subject line.

Curiouser and curiouser. I really wish the documentation would
indicate just =what= is supposed to happen.

That *is* interesting.

I don't know that I'd call these "bugs", if they are working as originally
intended. Perhaps the reasons for executing these actions don't match the
expectations of the user, but that is a somewhat different matter.

The moral of the story is not to use colons as punctuation
in a subject line IF you care about what happens to it later
as it passes through the hands of various and sundry
newsreaders.

Google was also swallowing up square brackets last time I checked
(five or six months ago), so tags like [OT], [META], [FA], etc.,
don't show up in the archive the way they did on first reading
from my NSP.

I'm not saying anyone has to care ...

Marty
--
Big-8 newsgroups: humanities.*, misc.*, news.*, rec.*, sci.*, soc.*, talk.*
See http://www.big-8.org for info on how to add or remove newsgroups.

On Mon, 28 May 2007 15:11:37 +0000, Jose wrote:

I expect so, but that's because sorting by thread and sorting by subject
are different operations. That they yield different results should be
no surprise.

When I didn't know better, I thought that threads were defined by the
subject line.

Fair enough.

There are advantages to sorting by subject line,

Perhaps this is the problem; I'm not aware of these advantages. What are
they?

and some
readers do not sort by threads unless set to "read all". Including
plonked posts.

I'm not aware of readers with this behavior. How is this manifested?
That is, what happens if one is not reading all and one sorts by thread?

- Andrew

Perhaps this is the problem; I'm not aware of
these advantages. What are they? [...]

When a subject line is changed, it is a good indication that the
conversation has changed. (the converse is of course not true).
Perhaps it's a bug (or feature) in my reader (Netscape 7.2) that when
sorting by threads, the sort list can't be alphabetized. In fact, I
can't figure out in what order they are presented (it could be, for
example, the order of the date of the latest post, the earliest post,
the earliest retained post...) My reader saves (on my hard drive) the
last x days worth of posts so that I can go back, even to plonked posts
(which I merely mark as read) without connecting to the net again.

Sometimes people reply (physically) to a post as a convenience, while
replying (semantically) to a different post, or combine replies to
several posts into one (I like when people do that intellegently).

Maybe my sort-by-thread is just buggy. But I doubt I'm the only one
with buggy software.

That is, what happens if one is not reading all and one sorts by thread?

On my reader, you can sort by thread, but you can't pick the order. You
can't collapse threads unless you are viewing all. Of course, viewing
by subject you can't collapse threads either.

Also, sometimes things just "get funky". I can't explain it because I
haven't done it enough - I just go back to reading by subject.

Jose
--
There are two kinds of people in the world. Those that just want to
know what button to push, and those that want to know what happens when
they push the button.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.