Hi, the correct way to deal with this sort of thing is for people to use the subject line properly, and to change it as and when necessary. That is the real problem, although personally I don't think it is a particularly bad problem. If I miss something interesting in one of the threads I delete, well tough.
Codes are just some sort of shorthand for the subject. If people don't change the subject, they won't change the codes. That's just a plain fact which spoils your system from the word go. In addition to that, many messages - not threads, but individual messages - include several subjects. You may be interested in some of these but not in others. So perhaps you need a set of codes to indicate which subjects the message includes. 3rd, you would need to get agreement on a large number of codes. There are a lot of people on the list who don't share all of your interests or dislikes. While each person's personal list might be small, the combined list would probably become large. This would certainly lead to multi-letter codes, or - horror! - mixtures of letters and digits (p1=printing, p2=processing,...). This would lead to quite a large number of multi-letter codes typed as sets into the subject line. Gee. That's words and phrases. Only now they don't belong to the language common to everybody on the list, but are arbitrary combinations which people are expected to remember. Coding schemes are great for computers, bad for people. Easy identification of the subject, and useful filtering comes from writing and maintaining useful subject lines, not inventing new languages and trying to impose them on other people. It may well be that people don't read some things they might otherwise have read. That's their choice. On the other hand, if people are to be criticised for not sticking to your coding system then people won't write things they might otherwise have written, and nobody gains from their wisdom. I suggest your efforts would be better spent trying to get us to change the subject line when appropriate. -- Cheers, Bob Monday, January 26, 2004, 11:27:01 AM, you wrote: > Labelling the subject in some simple way would not only help people like me > to eliminate unwanted posts -- but an F: for film would help select the > desirable ones as well. If the task becomes too laborious, as it often does, > I may sacrifice all and lose valuable exchanges as a result. Is that what > you want? Don't you care if your messages are read or not? Many members, > Boris for instance, get a lot from PDML and he is a lively contributor -- I > don't know where he finds the time. There are others like him. Easy > identification of the subject might help them as well. > I suggested a few labels. They are not arbitrary. 'D:' for digital is okay. > 'F:' for film would also be good. It would be very easy to type the two > characters needed to identify a subject. 'Dig:' would also be okay, but the > extra characters might be too much strain. 'Digital' would involve huge > effort. But it would be folly to come up with a list of 20 or more different > ids. No one would bother, or remember them. But the separation of digital > from film would be very useful. I know that P: for processing may not be so > good because there is printing to consider. > I don't need to be relieved of editing. As I said, if it's too much trouble > I just delete the lot. And maybe someone who was looking for information I > might have been able to provide loses my input. There are a few little > things I know about that can be useful to others sometimes. But it's usually > the other way around. I get a lot of invaluable information from PDML. Most > recently I found out about a fine scanner. > It didn't take me long to realise that there is always someone in the group > who knows the answer, or can help find it. And so, anything that makes it > easier for others to read your contributions is helpful.
