Recycling subject lines saves trees (was Re: Stop editing the damn subject (was Re: The End Of Western Civilization (was Re: RoadRunner nonsense (was Re: fwd: RE: STFU RE))

[Leo Mauler]

--- Billy Crook <billycrook at gmail.com> wrote:

> See, now isn't that annoying?  Cut it out, for 
> the love of god.  There is a reason emails have
> subject lines.  It's so I can mute them in
> gmail, and not be bothered with that thread 
> again.  When people change the subject line it 
> pollutes everyone's inbox, and breaks threaded
> reading and sorting.  Stop It.  Stop it now. 
> Internet pollution kills baby seals.
> 
> If you're going to change the subject line, change
> the damn subject, and write a completely different
> unrelated email.

While I can't pretend to have been using the Internet
since it was created, I can say with certainty that I
am old enough to have used "bang paths" and Internet
gateways to such services as Prodigy and Compuserve,
which was a loooong time ago.

And between that time and now, if someone replied to a
thread with message content that was *slightly*
different from the original subject's discussion
content, but not enough that the folks who had been
interested in the old thread would not be interested
in the new thread, they edited the subject line by
putting the old subject line in parentheses, with the
word "was" to indicate the old subject line.

While "it's traditional!" often leads to bad things
like the burning of astronomer "heretics" and the
failure to accept soap and proper daily hygiene as a
good idea, it also leads to Igor getting your coach
home by sunset so that the children of the night don't
make beautiful music while they feast upon your
corpse.

So I'm sticking by my tradition of recycling subject
lines.  It's worked for at least 15 years, and your
complaint is the first one I've seen about the practice.


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