[Mailman-Developers] From the creation of a ThreadID

[Barry Warsaw]

On Apr 07, 2012, at 10:53 PM, David Jeske wrote:

>Perhaps I misunderstood. If you are going to have a record of the deletion
>(i.e. you can keep a deleted message around in some form), this problem
>becomes much easier. I thought this desire was to have stable urls and
>threads when you rebuild and a message is missing.
>
>Absolutly if there is a message 'deletion' feature, it should delete the
>message contents but leave a 'stub' that links the message-id and
>references/in-reply-to, so it can help hold the thread together during a
>rebuild. My memory is foggy, but I think we used a technique like this in
>Yahoo Groups.

I like the scheme outlined by Toshio where (IIRC) any message-id can be used
to index into its thread.  I also agree with David that a deletion should keep
enough of a stub around to maintain consistent thread links.  I think this is
also important for the end-user.

Imagine you've found a particular taken-down message through a search engine
cache.  You then follow the url.  I think it would be better to give them an
informative message about the take-down rather than just 404'ing the url
(although the latter or similar might also be useful for spiders so that they
know the message is no longer available).

Stephen observes that complete deletion is occasionally necessary.  While
true, I still think a placeholder/stub could be inserted to keep the thread
integrity whole.

Cheers,
-Barry