[Swarm-Support] starting threads/subjects on Swarm mailing lists

[Alex Lancaster]

Hi folks,

Apologies for the mass thread, but since I've seen this happening
quite a lot recently, I have some small tips on starting a new
thread/subject on the Swarm mailing lists.

Please, when you're starting a completely new subject or thread on the
list (i.e. not following up a previous post), please use your mail
program to start a completely new "parent" thread, as if you were
e-mailing somebody from scratch.

Please *don't* just "reply" to a recent e-mail and change the subject,
because your mail program will include a reference to the previous
e-mail (which you may not necessarily see), and the new mail will
appear to belong to "old" thread, as opposed to being a "new"
(top-level) parent thread.  This means that that the new thread will
look out of place in the mailing list archives, making it hard to
follow a single thread.

You can see this problem if you look at the bottom of the March
archive:

http://www.swarm.org/pipermail/support/2003-March/thread.html

[Swarm-Support] method `dropAllocations:' not implemented by protocol ?   
amores nolikeyjunk
   * [Swarm-Support] method `dropAllocations:' not implemented by protocol ?   
Paul Johnson
      o [Swarm-Support] Panel buttons   Li An

Li An's post on "Panel buttons" looks like it "belongs" to the parent
post on "method dropAllocations", whereas it's a completely new
subject, and should appear as a "top" level thread.

The exception to this rule is if you are following up on a particular
thread, but the subject of the thread has drifted far enough from the
original subject, then you reply and change the subject and refer to
the old subject in brackets, prefixed by "was").  e.g. if you were
following up to *this* post, you would change the subject like so:

Subject: Annoying mailing list admins (was starting threads/subjects on swarm 
mailing lists)

Hopefully this hasn't been too annoying, but if you keep to some
simple conventions when posting to the mailing list, it keeps the
archives neat and enables these archive to be an even better resource
to the community, because it's easier to navigate the posts in thread
order.

Thanks,

Alex, your friendly swarm.org mailing list admin ;-)