Email notifications - subject line codes
It looks like those irritating codes at the end of the subject line are going
to stay. There are a couple of things about them that make them even more
irritating, but they could - I should have thought - easily be put right.
(1) The first part looks like six randomly generated ascii characters
signifying the date. If that is the case, then five digits would do until
October 2173, just by counting days since 1 January 1900 (today is 39919, for
example). This would mean that parts of a thread sorted by subject would stay
in the right date order even though the thread spanned more than one day. They
don't at the moment, unless the random code happens to sort alphanumerically
in the right order.
(2) It looks as if the last four characters increment as posts are recorded.
The problem here is that they increment according to the ascii sort order,
which cannot be specified for any mail client that I know of. The sort order
is , whereas 'normal' sorting would put A and a before B and
b, and so on. Again, messages sorted by subject get out of date order. This
could be put right by, say, excluding small letters from the mix. This would
admittedly reduce the number of available 4-character codes to only 1.7
million instead of 14.8 million, but I should have thought that that was
enough to keep them going until the next rehash of the forum system.
The middle three characters have been tvi for all the notifications I have
received.
Then, remove the superfluous 'Re: ' at the start of the subject line for
replies, and we've got a groupable, if not threadable, set of messages.
Comments, anybody?
Noel
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