Personally, I want nodes to have a common title because I track discussions and the level of replies through their title. I could be using Recently Active Threads to find nodes pertaining to a thread, but I'm not using it. Also I think that even RAT does not indicate at which level a reply sits. Which is why I ask authors not to erase the original thread title but to keep their additions or the relevant topic in parentheses. As an example, many nodes by tye have this.

I don't see that there is any technical need for preventing changing of the subject. The system does not need to be idiot-proof - completely erasing the title of a node rarely happens at all and there might be even a situation where I consider the complete eradication of the "level information" appropriate.

Which is why I ask authors not to erase the original thread title but to keep their additions or the relevant topic in parentheses. As an example, many nodes by tye have this.

I tend to augment titles briefly with parenthetical comments because I very rarely make replies that completely change the subject from that of the thread. But I'm also happy to see node titles that are new but include a brief connection to the parent node title in parens.

I prefer the "Re^$x:" prefix for titles to be inviolate (I find it very useful information) but the less-desirable "New title (Re^5: Old title)" is at least unlikely to get thread ettiquitte explained to you (or your node simply considered for a title change). But really, leaving the "Re^$x:" in front scales better.

Note my use of the word "brief" more than once. I'd hate to see a proliferation of "New title (originally was Re^5: Some really long title that was way too long to begin with (including parenthetical asides for some strange reason))" titles. The point of the connection between titles of replies and their parent is for the benefit of humans so complete literalness is not a benefit.

Also note that I'd like to see more (useful) title decoration / adjustment. It is annoying, for example, to have an extended flame fest about orbital mechanics all under titles of "Re^$x: Best practices" (or whatever original subject lead to the severe tangent). And it would be nice to be able to more often tell subthreads apart just from the node titles (which is nearly all that is displayed in most places that list nodes -- search results, Newest Nodes, list of nodes by a specific author, links to nodes via id://NNN w/o the annoying "|this", etc.).

Also, in my experience, completely replacing the title almost always results in rather poor documentation as to the subject of the node. It leads to the title being more about how the node is different from the parent and discarding that part of the point of the node is the original topic that motivated it. So keeping the original title mentioned in a new title is a good idea even beyond the above considerations.

If you reply to a node titled "Re^$x: New title (old title summary)", feel free to drop the "(old title summary)" (or, even better, replace it with a brief clue as to how your reply relates to the new title).

- tye        

Recently Active Threads does show reply level through indentation, which is one of the reasons I prefer it to Newest Nodes. At least, that's how it works in the "Node Ancestors" view mode, which I believe is the default; other modes may vary, and I don't have time just now to explore them all.

I usually hang around on Newest Nodes. On that page, all the replies to everything are all jumbled together (ordered by time), but I can tell what thread they go in and what level they are at if they still have the default title. Your replies, on the other hand, have had their context removed.

It is easy enough to go to the node and see what its parent is, what thread it's in. Nevertheless, this is an extra step I'd have to take to find that out for your nodes, and not anyone else's.

I generally agree with Corion and tye (and documented policy) on this matter — though I'm in the opposite camp as tye on the question of what should go in parentheses and where.

However, in this case, I refrained from raising the issue (considering the node for retitle) because it looked to me like a case of someone purposefully constructing a family of closely related nodes. Sometimes you want a set of topically autonomous nodes, but use the root + children structure to bind them together. Anyway, it looked to me like a work in progress, so I thought I'd at least wait to see how it all settled down; maybe the sense of it would become apparent.

though I'm in the opposite camp as tye on the question of what should go in parentheses and where.

On the first part, my node documented my approval for new or old title in parens (depending on whether the new title is a major shift in subject or just a minor annotation) so I guess this means that your position is neither new nor old title in parens. "and where"? So I guess you want the parens at the front of the title? That was widely frowned upon in the past and I agree (in hindsight).

But I actually guess that neither of the above guesses is correct.

- tye        

Or maybe I don't disagree with you. It's hard for me to tell, since your post is so rambling. At any rate, I think the pattern "Re^n: New title (Old title summary)" is a very, very bad idea, because it implies that the parent was "Re^n-1: New title".

1. a system must be idiot-proof.

As soon as we get idiots to be idiot-proof, we might want to begin expanding that concept to other realms, and, lastly, apply it to systems.

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Since the conversations here are threaded there is no real reason you can't change your title. If readers want to know how nodes are connected they can use the threaded view. If your node is so significantly different as to deserve a different subject then it realy isn't any lose of information if it shows up on Newest Nodes without the original subject (as it IS a new subject). So I think you are fine and your node titles have been fine by me. I believe this is one of those topics where the minority wins out normaly just because they are more vocal about the issue. The fact is, if they want to see relationship between nodes on NN then they should patch it to use the meta-data available in other parts of the node (not the subject) to determine and display those relationships. (or use the handy Recent Threads which does exactly that)

Since the conversations here are threaded there is no real reason you can't change your title. If readers want to know how nodes are connected they can use the threaded view.

Yes, I'm inclined to agree. I dropped in here -- as I presume you did -- because I just received a nag message from "jdporter" (which I suspect was automatically generated), and I'm trying to figure out what the issue is here, and I still don't get it. It would appear that the system is broken (at least from the point of view of people who track "newest nodes"), and rather than fix the system they would rather bitch at us clueless newbies.

If you guys want a particular type of subject renaming style you should write up a style guide -- you know, like a SYNOPSIS section -- don't make us hunt around for examples of the approved ways of doing it.

You also might want to ponder that for several decades netiquette has strongly recommended changing subject names to reflect the content of a posting.