RSS feed - posts relationship

[Steffen]

Hi,

I just want to point out some small screw which I think is missing in the setup of the forum's RSS feed:

I personally find the subject line of posts very useful:
ideally, they sum up a post, so a reader can follow a thread roughly without having to read
each and every post. Here is an example (just the subject lines given):

Code:

Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
               That feature is already present as ABC.
                        No, it is not - technical explanation
               Do we need XYZ at all
                        Yes
                        Yes
                        Yes
                        Yes
                        No
                        No
               How can we technically add feature XYZ?
                        Suggestion 1          
                        Suggestion 2
                        Suggestion 3

Here's how the same looks if not using the subject line as sum-up:

Code:

Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
               Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
                        Re: Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
               Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
                        Re: Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
                        Re: Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
                        Re: Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
                        Re: Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
                        Re: Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
                        Re: Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
               Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
                        Re: Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.          
                        Re: Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.
                        Re: Re: Cool idea about adding feature XYZ.

I find the second instance pretty useless. To see what actually happened in the thread,
I have to read all posts.

This is the reason why I usually write the subject line last when composing a post here,
to let it sum up the contents of the post.

Now here's the missing screw: the RSS feed of the forums does not seem to insert the necessary XML elements
which relate one post to its parent.
Instead, the relationship will only be correctly shown if people keep the subject line and just add a "Re:" in front.
This is a little sad IMHO. Philo told me about this, I don't know which RSS reader he's using, but I think
a little massage of the output RSS XML stream should be able to cure this.

Is anybody willing or able to shed some more light into this?

It would be nice if RSS readers would show related posts correctly,
even if their subject line is different than the one of the original post it replies to.

[Orion Pobursky]

I think it's a matter of taste. I like the second option. When you change the subject line it's hard for me to follow a discussion on the Recent Messages page since the subjects don't immediately relate.