subject heading netiquette

[Bratty John]

May I suggest an addition to the netiquette section of the bionet FAQ?

My suggestion is that when people post follow-ups to bionet.* groups,
they should NOT CHANGE THE SUBJECT HEADER, even by an iota.

There are at least two reasons I can think of, i.e. two reasons that
changes of subject are mildly annoying to me and, I'll wager, lots of
others:

	i) When killing threads, the kill only works on articles with
	the same subject.  This was a very useful function recently
	with the "voices" thread, but was often subverted, even by
	well-meaning posters who would not have wanted readers not
	following the voices thread to be forced to read their
	contribution. 

	ii) Most news-reading software groups messages in a thread
	together, which is very nice when you are wading through
	high-traffic groups such as bionet.general.  Messages with
	altered subjects (often it is something really minor, like
	different capitalization) are orphaned, causing them to lose
	their context and probably some of their impact.

So, by maintaining exactly the same subject, you can ensure that your
post is grouped with related ones when read by readers with adequate
software; at the same time, you can be sure that you are not
distracting people who are not interested in the particular subject
under discussion.

Just a thought.

Oh, and "FORZA BULGARIA!!"  (Please flame me personnally if you don't
like this last comment; don't clutter up the bionet with posts about
the World Cup of Soccer.)

Ciao,

-- 

John Bratty		     	bratty at medcn.umontreal.ca 
Dept. de Biochimie	                                 
Universite de Montreal     	(514) 343-6111, ext. 5165 
Montreal, Canada H3C 3J7                               

--

John Bratty		     	bratty at medcn.umontreal.ca 
Dept. de Biochimie	                                 
Universite de Montreal     	(514) 343-6111, ext. 5165 
Montreal, Canada H3C 3J7