Re: Collapsing Re:'s in Titles.

[jonadab]

if it were up to me, "Re: $original_title" would be enough with any reply (even up to a milion levels deep)

Agreed. This reply-marking-for-subject-lines stuff has all been tried every possible way and the advantages and disadvantages of various systems discussed and rediscussed to death over the course of thirty plus years for usenet and email, and the consensus after all that was, just one "Re: " and nothing more, unless the user manually changes the subject line. I was under the impression that everyone on the internet was aware of this, until I came to Perlmonks. Replacing Re: Re: Re: with Re^3: brings us up-to-date with what newsreaders and mailreaders were experimenting with in the 1980s that was subsequently determined to be the Wrong Thing (as eventually codified in the GNKSA).

Yes, I realize Perlmonks isn't usenet, but for all practical purposes the subject lines are doing exactly the same thing, and lessons learned about subject lines there do apply just as well here. Experimenting with alternatives that the rest of the world already tried and rejected is a waste; I wasn't going to say anything about it before because I figured it was something that just hadn't been gotten around to yet, but if we're going to go to the trouble to change the behavior, the behavior to shoot for is the behavior we already know will eventually be determined to be right, I would think.