For your benefit I am posting a link to a fantastic program that enhances the newsreading capabilities of Outlook Express. OE-Quotefix cleans up messy quoting, strips signatures of messages you reply to, colors different levels of replies for easier reading, provides an option to bottom-post if you so desire, shows emoticons, corrects line breaks, and other things.
The one thing it doesn't fix is OE's bug of stripping OT: from the subject line if it is the first group of characters and replacing it with Re: This is a well-known bug most users should be aware of as a courtesy to other newsgroup users. However with a bit of practice OE users can train themselves to watch the subject line when replying.
Please take the time to check out the site and consider using this enhancement.
I don't know that I'd characterize it as a bug, per se. OE does consistently ignore XX: patterns in the subject line so that: re: Hi there and Hi there sort together. The action to be taken with OT: or other subject line prefixes is debatable. If it's: OT: and I'm replying to it, RE: OT: has some advantages, in that when the root post is purged, it's still obviously OT and: RE: has other advantages - specifically in how the sorting is arranged after the root post is purged.
And I particularly like the sort feature, so I'm willing to overlook OE's other peculiarities a bit. My work e-mailer does not take RE: into account when sorting by subject and it's a feature that's sorely missed.
We have been over this before. Outlook Express will strip Re: or OT: or anything before the : (colon) and replace it with a new Re: when composing a reply to a message. This becomes a problem when an OE user is the first replier in a branch to an OT: (OT colon) topic. It will strip the OT: and replace it with a Re: which then makes the rest of the branch do the same when replying to the OE user.
This bug is not exhibited when the OE user is NOT the first replier in a branch to a topic beginning with OT: because other newsreaders will still insert a Re: followed by the original OT:
OE will still strip the Re: and replace it with its own Re: although no one notices the bug manifesting itself anymore.
That will depend on what the rules are for the sort. I personally like the current OE behavior, in which the first two (maybe it's more) characters before a colon (appearing by position 3?) are ignored and the sort begins on the first non-whitespace character following the colon. If you strip off the OT: and replace it with RE:...
OT: 1
2
3
remains:
RE: 1 RE: 2 RE: 3
after replies are applied. If you keep the OT: after the RE: is inserted, would you then get:
RE: 2 RE: 3 RE: OT: 1
? That wouldn't be my preference.
I'm not going to say I'm an expert on this but I have sometimes written software that involved sorting based on functions or rules applied to text strings, so I'm not just babbling mindlessly, I have given this "sort" of thing some thought. ;-)
We (you and I) haven't discussed it before, although you did point out the behavior to me.
Now, I can see where this would be inconvenient if two people reply to the same base post, as the reply subject strings will diverge.
Is the behavior defined as part of an accepted standard for newsgroups? If not, we're discussing a preference and "bug" is not an applicable term.
I used to work for a company that sold sofware and hardware commercially. We received a bug report. The project leader closed it promptly, saying the observed behavior wasn't a "bug," it was a "feature." The customer promptly reopened the bug report, saying, yes, it IS a "bug."
The project leader called the customer directly and negotiated a deal. The customer would give up complaining about a "bug," we would not claim the behavior was a "feature;" we agreed it was an "aspect" of the software.
I was looking down the list, and I notice that Scott posted several articles that start off with OT blah blah blah. (not dissing Scott and his blah blah blah). I always sort by date and time because I like to follow discussions in order. My limited experience is that ONLY the first post in any thread is sorted by the Subject anyway, and subsequent Reply's ate sorted by date and time so the thread remains linear.
It is OT: The colon is the root of the problem. And this is only true if you are the first replier to the OT: branch. If you reply to a Re: OT: it won't affect the OT: because MSOE is only stripping the Re: and replacing it with another Re:
Hopefully that will make more sense. That is why I have advocated using {OT} or [OT] or OT- or anything other than OT: by original posters.
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