Viewing answers to one's nntp posts in Thunderbird

[Tim]

On Tue, 2009-10-06 at 08:23 +0500, gilpel at altern.org wrote:
> When a thread has hundreds of posts, the discussion often becomes
> irrelevant to the original post and then you have to find out answers
> to your posts among hundred of posts. So, sometimes, you miss some
> relevant answers to your posts, which is not very nice to people who
> took time to answer you.

Well, if respondents respond directly to a message that they're replying
to, then the different replies branch out into different threads, and
you can ignore them, and watch the replies to the original poster, or
replies part way through.

Here's the threading for a post by Fred, two people directly replied to
Fred (Tim & John), and the topic went in two and a half different ways
from then on:

Fred said,
  Tim replied to Fred
     Barney replied to Tim
     Wilma replied to Tim
  John replied to Fred
     George replied to Fred
        Kym replied to George

If one of the branches off didn't interest you, you could ignore it
(either by using an ignore function on a good client, which ignored that
post and descendants, but not parents), or collapse the thread by
clicking on a collapsing/expanding icon left of the names.

Of course that all falls in a heap when some dingbat replies to
something said by Barney, but does so by hitting reply on a message
written by George, because they're too lazy to go back to the right
post.  Usually quoting the whole thing, and not actually replying to
anything written in the quote...

I used to be a BBS SysOp, and we either deleted posts that stuffed
things up, or forcibly moved their posts to somewhere else.  Smartarses
would find themselves in the "flaming" room, where anybody and everybody
who liked writing sharp responses wouldn't hold back.  ;-)

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
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