Please accurate message titles

[ECOLING at aol.com]

Subject lines of messages on our list,
as on many other lists,
often bear no resemblance to the contents of the messages.

This makes it very difficult to find a message we want at a later time,
and difficult to retrieve messages from Archive, etc.

It also makes it difficult to sort incoming messages.

I beg our list members to title their messages by deliberate choice,
not by simply pressing the "reply" button.

Just as three examples:

***

Messages with this title:

Re: "centum"/"satem" "exceptions" [was Re: Northwest IE attributes]

have been appearing for some time which are about NEITHER
of those topics, but which are about the PIE vowel system,
whether it had only /e/ or also others, specifically /i,u/
independent of ablauting /ei, eu/, and etc.

I would love to have been able to find and group the messages
which really were about the centum/satem topic.
quite enlightening and full of details.

I cannot do so.
Or can do so only with much greater difficulty.

***

Messages with the title:

"Urheimat..."

appeared for a long time which had nothing to do whose subject
had moved, first to Uralic and IE locations, and then
moved further to very specific topics in Uralic-IE loanwords.

Since Uralic-IE relations are an important topic,
and since only *some* of the messages under the subject line
"Urheimat..." were about Uralic,
I would LOVE to be able to retrieve all of these
messages, or to sort them in displaying the contents of
my storage disk, which would mention Uralic.
Or even more specifically which would mention
Uralic-IE loanwords.  Or even more specifically,
given the number of messages on the subject,
Uralic-IE loanword 'name'.

I cannot do so.
Or can do so only with much greater difficulty.

***

Messages with the title:

Re: "is the same as"

appeared for a long time which had nothing to do with that
original discussion.

Whatever they were about,
they are now essentially lost to retrieval.

***

Can we do a better job of choosing subject lines
in messages?

Do we all want to give our list moderator permission
to retitle messages whose content is clearly and blatantly
not any longer about what the subject line refers to?
(Would our moderator even like to have that freedom?
It would be a small amount of work, occasionally,
though after each retitling presumably the "Reply..."
button would then work properly for quite a while,
and the list would be much better organized.)

***

Best wishes,
Lloyd Anderson

[ Moderator's comments:
  I have, from time to time, taken it upon myself to change the Subject: line
  when messages have drifted far from their original topic, but I do not have
  the time to do this consistently.

  The search facility at the archives maintained on our behalf by the fine
  folks at linguistlist.org can, and does, work on message content as well as
  on subject lines.  But I agree that topic changes should be reflected in the
  message headers.  There is even a standard for such:  Include the old text
  in square brackets with the word "was:" prepended, as in the first example
  above.
  --rma ]