Sometimes I chat via my WAP cell phone. In such cases, even having the node ID in my personal nodelet is not of much use. In fact, last night this very subject came up and I linked to (tye)Re: A question of style. And, as I've said repeatedly, this is only one example of a place where duplicate node titles would cause me problems. There are lots of times I've been glad that I or someone else has personalized their reply indicator, but I rarely try to memorize those cases when I run into them so I don't have a big list of them handy. I can understand you not seeing the use in them. That is fine. I see many uses and so will continue to use them.

As for retitling that node... A few have suggested that I make a tutorial out of that node of mine. I might do that some day, but I don't feel that just copying the node to tutorials is appropriate. It needs some work to become worthy of being a tutorial, to my mind. And at different times there are different nodes that I know the titles of but don't know the node IDs of that I sometimes wish to link to when it isn't convenient to look up the node ID. Sometimes I've bothered to note the node ID someplace, but often the node is not something that I expected I'd want to refer back to. So retitling often wouldn't work. Also, I'm not interested in retitling that node now. For one thing, I've now linked to it a few times from nodes via the title. For another, I think it fits into that thread nicely with the title it has.

And I don't consider stripping my "(tye)" (and possible digits) from the title when you reply to one of my replies any kind of protest. I prefer it that way. I dislike the practice of taking the time to adjust the title but not bothering to remove previous personalizations. You see, it isn't a vanity thing; I don't expect or even want you to preserve my indicator and I'm surprised when I see people hint at that (like it is my indicator and they don't feel they have the right to mess with it -- which is true when it is in the title of my reply, I suppose, but not otherwise). I certainly don't mind people just letting the default "Re: $previous_title" stand. But if you want to adjust the title, I would prefer that you also trim the previous extra bits out. So you'll never see a title like your example ("Re: •Re: (tye)Re: (FoxUni)Re: Re: foo bar.") because I'd have stripped the "(FoxUni)Re: Re: " part out. ;) Not that I have plans or even desires to ban or force any of these things.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")