Some of you may have noticed that the subjects of posts in long threads grow longer and longer. E.g, you can see this in this thread, where by the last page of the thread, the list name, forum name, and reply tags have become so numerous as to have pushed the substantive part of the subject beyond the maximum subject length the forum supports:
[messages] [Developers] Re: [Developers] Re: [Developers] Re: [Developers
This is not ideal. I’d like to adjust the list-forum bridge to prevent such things from happening.
Observations:
- Mailman, our list software, will prepends “[list]” to the subject of some messages sent to the list. I haven’t checked the code in Mailman, so I don’t know exactly what’s it’s doing, but this is what I’ve seen, Subject as sent on the left, Subject returned from the list on the right:
Foo → [list] Foo
[list] Foo → [list] Foo
Foo [list] → [list] Foo
Foo [list] [list] → [list] Foo
Foo[list]Foo → [list] FooFoo
Re: [list] Foo → Re: [list] Foo
My guess is that Mailman looks at the substring following "Re: ", strips every occurance of “[list]”, and prepends "[list] " to that substring. This is consistent with my testing, and the fact that we never see “[messages]” twice in any of the Subjects of posts in the forum which originated from the list.
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Some mail clients are smart enough not to prepend "Re: " to Subjects which already start with it, but it appears that somehow we end up with multiple "Re: " anyway.
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The list bridge pays no attention to whether the name of the subforum already appears in the Subject when sending mail out to the list—it prepends “[subforum]” unconditionally.
Proposal:
A. I’d like to adopt Mailman’s policy of stripping the list tag for also stripping subforum tags.
B. “[messages]” is a poor tag to use for our mailing list. Something like “[vassal]” would be better, though that would make the Subject tag not match the username part of the list address.
Does anyone object to either of these changes? Does anyone have a suggestion for how best to implement A?