Personally I just put titles in the format Re(3): $title and it works fine. As for defaulting to something similar, see these nodes:

• Feature request: Collapsing
• Title Re: collapsing revisited

I think it works better if people can choose their title format though. Maybe make it an option in user settings to collapse or not. :)

Makeshifts last the longest.

I didn't see any code in those threads that deals with most of the current situations that would need to be dealt with. Take this thread for example. Should my node be titled Re: " getting out of hand. ? We aren't talking about quotes getting out of hand.

And take the title of my reply as just one example of the many, many alternates to "Re: " x $depth that are currently in use. Most of the code I've seen doesn't deal with most of those. If there is one that deals with nearly all of them, please point it out.

And I don't understand the attempts to collapse "Re: (bob) Re:" but keep the "(bob)" part. I certainly don't want "(tye)" kept in every title to every reply to every reply to every reply to a reply of mine. That would just be silly.

From my scratchpad (been there a long time):

---

So, would this work for collapsing "Re: " and (most of) the many variants of it without removing other things?     s#^(\S*(?<=\W)re(?=\W)\S*\s*)+##i I don't have time to play with this, so I wanted to make a note of it. Personally, I like to be able to not only distinguish root nodes from replies but to also easily distinguish first-level replies (which are usually "answers") from lower-level replies (which are usually "corrections"). So I'm not yet sold on defaulting to simply one "Re: " for all types of replies, but I am getting interested in allowing people have "Re: "s and variants stripped from titles when they reply.

Perhaps we could "standardize" on "Re: " then "Re2: ", "Re3: ", ... I think someone even proposed that. Something like:

    my $depth= 1;
   while(  $title =~ s#^(\S*(?<=\W)re(?=\W)\S*)\s*##  ) {
        my $re= $1;
        $depth += ( $re =~ /(\d+)/ ) ? $1 : 1;
   }
   $title= "Re$depth: $title";
[download]

or perhaps just compute the depth from the root node.

---

But you'll note that this also strips the current title down to Re: getting out of hand.. So I don't think anyone has come up with a full enough solution.

And I have yet to see any concensus on what a good default replacement for "Re: " x $depth is. I personally don't much like most of the proposals I've seen and I suspect most people don't much like most of my proposals.

So I don't see a solution yet. In the whole scheme of things I think this rates right up there with, um, well... not much. Something pretty trivial, I guess.

        - tye

The problems with schemes you are proposing is that you are assuming the 'Re:' and/or discussion depth should be part of the title. Assuming everything is stored in a database, what you need is store the title without any 'Re' prefixes in the database, along with a depth count. A root node would get a depth count of 0, a reply of 1, a reply to that gets 2, etc. The displayed title (at the post itself, or in the newest node list) can get a 'Re:' prepended. Or 'Re: Re: Re: Re:'. Or 'Re^17:'. It could even be user configurable.

One thing left open is whether a subject change should mean the depth count is reset or not.

Abigail

I agree that this is somewhat trivial. The only benefit from a standardized naming convention is to aid in finding nodes. Not being able to find something on Perl Monks is somewhat rare, although it does happen.

As long as the node title is easily searchable, I see no reason to change it. And if it isn't, that node just doesn't get seen as often as it could.

John J Reiser
newrisedesigns.com

Perhaps first level replies in the Seekers of Perl Wisdom section could prepend "Ans: " as a default instead? If it's not an answer, the burden would be on the user to change it, though.

I'm not very familiar with the inner workings of the Everything2 engine but is it possible to have it strip out the (user) denoter such as s/^\s*\($in_reply_to_user\)\s*// before the Re: is prepended? People aren't likely to manually retype (tye) into a post title, are they?

You can always go back and edit your titles to tidy things up, if you're so inclined.

Why they just can't have it stay where it is like e-mail is beyond me. You do find the odd e-mail that says "Re: Fwd: Re: (Fwd) My Resume" but that's not typical.

One "Re:" is enough, isn't it?

Back when I was using Windows, I used TheBat! for reading mail, and one of its favourite attention-to-detail features of mine was how it would set the subject to something like Re[2]:. I think the people who use Newest Nodes or a script that reads its ticker to browse the monastery (that includes me) find the information the Re: nesting provides quite useful.

Makeshifts last the longest.