Re: Quit Shopping For Fun

Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote or quoted:

Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

To avoid poisoned Subject lines on Usenet, I start a brand new
thread if I want to respond to something written under a poisoned
Subject lines.

There is no need for a new thread to change the subject line.  Just
change the subject line to a "non-poisned" one.  The post will (if
using a proper Usenet reader) still be linked into the hierarchy of the
replies connected to the original one.

  Yes. And in such cases such a linking is exactly what I want to avoid.
 
  In my opinion, today, it's not enough anymore to only take into
  consideration how something looks using a proper newsreader. One
  also might want to think about how it will look when mirrored in
  the Web. In the Web, a post with a changed subject might still
  appear on a page titled by the original subject.

  Back in the day when mirroring on the web wasn't such a common
  practice, I didn't just tweak the subject line, but was a stickler
  for adhering to the "(was: ...)" convention to a T, and if I need to
  change a subject line that isn't poisoned, I still do it this way.

  BTW: Above I used the suggestion "poisoned Subject" I got from a
  translation service. Thinking about it then, I wondered whether
  "tainted Subject" would be more apt. Both are translations of
  the German "vergiftet", but I know "tainted" from "tainted love"
  and "tainted Subject" seems to be similar in the idea. - And
  I used an uppercase "S" in "Subject" because thats the exact tag
  of the Subject line in a Usenet post.