The new system is keeping track of who you responded to rather than just
noting the subject line. It creates a tree structure. If you respond
to the original post, your response becomes one of the main branches
sprouting from that original message. If you respond to a response,
your message appears as a branch off of that later message. This has
both advantages and disadvantages.
Advantage:
When viewing the archives, your response shows up as a direct response
to the message you were looking at when you hit the reply button. That
might be exactly what you want. It allows people to see who you were
responding to. It allows a mapping of subtopics within larger topic
without spawning new subject lines.
Disadvantage:
After reading a slug of posts on a topic, if you want to make a general
comment about the entire subject, you have to search back and find the
original post and respond to that.
Disadvantage:
If you have read a slug of posts on a topic that has sprouted several
branches (subtopics), and you want your post to appear as a new branch
at the point when that new subtopic began, you have to search back to
who first mentioned that topic, and reply to that post.
Disadvantage:
When reading the archives you have multiple paths to navigate if you
want to follow the discussion. That can get confusing even though the
intent was to make it more clear who was responding to whom.
Disadvantage:
If you want to create a new subject you cannot reply to someone. You
have to create a new message and manually fill in the PHYS-L address.
That's not unduly difficult if you have PHY-L in your address book, but
it is extra work.
I have listed more disadvantages than advantages, but I can imagine
discussions for which the single advantage of tracking who responded to
whom could outweigh all the disadvantages. However, I have been on some
lists that operate this way, and I have never found the advantage to
outweigh the disadvantages.
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu