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]

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.