On 9 Jun 2014, at 20:58, Bartosz DziewoĆski matma.rex@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, 09 Jun 2014 20:52:44 +0200, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoekstra@gmail.com wrote:
In this case, which post are you replying to in flow when you reply to multiple people? In mediawiki you sort of work around the issue, and it sort of works because you try to create some ad-hoc solution. When the software creates a hard dependency between posts, where it is difficult now to keep track of these kinds of discussion, it may become even more difficult to follow them then. Since we've established that this is something that currently does happen, I think even if it is (to be polite (?)) completely insane, it's something that should be supported anyway.
When I encounter this issue on mailing lists, I usually just reply to the lowest common ancestor of all the posts I want to reply to at once, or split my reply and respond to each separately.
(And mailing lists are interesting by itself, because most actual e-mail clients display the discussion in a threaded fashion, while most webmails like GMail display a flat list of replies.)
Introducing a structured discussion is hard enough, let's not invent issues where there are none. :)
I have used many different desktop and mobile e-mail applications that aren't web based. The last time I've seen it displayed threaded instead of flattened by default was when I installed Microsoft Office on Windows 98 SE which hid Outlook Express and intruced Microsoft Outlook and with it it exposed me to threaded display of mailing lists[1].
Every other mail client I've used did not do this (not for mailing lists, not for regular inbox). Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird, Apple Mail and various web-based clients.
These different clients may have carried over my preferences, but they all had an option to display it flattened. And I believe it was the default.
While we may or may not know what the default was, I'm pretty sure that "most e-mail clients display discussions in a threaded fashion" is pertinently not true.
-- Krinkle
[1] Would've roughly looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/fK1NV2G.png