[Mailman-Users] weird archive "thread" view

[IEM - network operating center (IOhannes m zmoelnig)]

Mark Sapiro wrote:
> IEM - network operating center (IOhannes m zmoelnig) wrote:
>> a user of one of my mailinglists noted that the thread-view of my 
>> mailing-list archives has become weird in the last months: basically new 
>> threads are sometimes subthreads of unrelated threads.
>> while there is always the chance, that users will just hijack a thread, 
>> i am pretty sure that this did not happen in various other cases (i 
>> looked at the headers of the mails coming in through the list, and they 
>> did not refer to any other mails)
> 
> 
> Look at the messages in archives/private/pd-list.mbox/pd-list.mbox. The
> archives are threaded by message-id in References: and/or In-Reply-To:
> 
> If messages are threaded without one of those headers referencing a
> prior message in the thread, then there is a problem with pipermail,
> but if the header is there, it is a problem with the user or the
> user's MUA.

as you have already noticed the problem seems to be somewhere else.
the references are correct within the mbox file.


one thing that might be related to this is: if a thread was started in 
an earlier archive-volume, the thread continuation will be indented as 
if it was in the same archive-volume.
e.g. a thread starts late january and by february it has reached a depth 
of 4.
in the archives for february, it will thus start with a thread-depth 4, 
making it _appear_ as if it was part of another thread (which by chance 
might have had depth 3.
it might be a good idea to somehow make thread boundaries visible with 
some more explicit technique than indentation.


my own hackery _might_ be related in a weird way: after the upgrade from 
2.1.9(patched) to 2.1.11 the archiver stopped working alltogether (since 
i added a new archive-type "month00" rather than replacing "month"); so 
some mails have not been archived at all; which might make up for the 
weird threading (e.g. if the initial mail of a thread had not been 
archived, the next mail would start at level 2; again making it appear 
as if it was a follow-up to something unrelated)

in any case i am attaching my hackery...


>> and, btw, is there a reason why the max thread-depth seems to be 4?
> 
> 
> It's only the display depth that's limited to 4 to keep the page from
> growing too wide.


is this settable somewhere in a configuration file?
i found THREADLEVELS in Mailman/Archiver/HyperArch.py, but no relation 
to mm_cfg.
(even though i have a hacked version of mailman, i prefer to keep the 
number of hacks minimal :-))


gmasd
IOhannes



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IEM - network operation center
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