This (Re:xxxx) has been discussed for the last 2 or 3 years in the drupal community. At some point (2 or 3 versions ago) drupal even had the Re:xxx as a default for comments. However, there are good reasons, most of them to be found on the abandoned http://drop.org village why "Re:xxx" is no good. For example, see //this posting from 2001.
I still think these arguments are still valid, despite the fact that I'm (was) a usenet addict. So while one is free to use this patch, I doubt it will be hitting the core. Feel free to make a module with an optional "Re:xxx" option.
One of the problems I've encountered with Drupal is that the people who work on its code are hacker types who seem focused on making Drupal Do The Right Thing for other hacker types. I'm a long-time code hacker as well, but right now I'm trying to make Drupal work for a very novice group of users who want to get as much out of the site I'm building in as little time as possible.
To these users, the distinction between topics and comments is useless, and in fact something a lot closer to Usenet would be much more appropriate for them. When one of these users posts a response to a topic or comment, as far as they're concerned, the subject of their response is the same as the subject of what they're replying to, or they'd be responding in a different thread! They don't want to have to waste time thinking up a new subject for their response, and indeed it doesn't make sense to force them to do so.
I think there is a class of users for which using "Re: " by default is the right solution. I'm happy to implement this as a separate, optional module, only I'm relatively new to programming Drupal so I wouldn't know where to begin writing a module which would muck around with the internals of a different module. My guess is that I'd have to add a module_invoke_all("comment", "edit", ) hook somewhere inside comment.module to allow my module to muck with the default values of the edit form. Is that the right approach.
In the meantime, here's a new patch against 4.4.0-rc.
IMHO if you implement this as an optional setting (ie. the admin can set if the re: will be default or not), then it has a better chance to get accepted. The default should be the current behaviour (no re: prepending, no default subject).
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Comments
Comment #1
bertboerland commentedThis (Re:xxxx) has been discussed for the last 2 or 3 years in the drupal community. At some point (2 or 3 versions ago) drupal even had the Re:xxx as a default for comments. However, there are good reasons, most of them to be found on the abandoned http://drop.org village why "Re:xxx" is no good. For example, see //this posting from 2001.
I still think these arguments are still valid, despite the fact that I'm (was) a usenet addict. So while one is free to use this patch, I doubt it will be hitting the core. Feel free to make a module with an optional "Re:xxx" option.
Comment #2
jik commentedOne of the problems I've encountered with Drupal is that the people who work on its code are hacker types who seem focused on making Drupal Do The Right Thing for other hacker types. I'm a long-time code hacker as well, but right now I'm trying to make Drupal work for a very novice group of users who want to get as much out of the site I'm building in as little time as possible.
To these users, the distinction between topics and comments is useless, and in fact something a lot closer to Usenet would be much more appropriate for them. When one of these users posts a response to a topic or comment, as far as they're concerned, the subject of their response is the same as the subject of what they're replying to, or they'd be responding in a different thread! They don't want to have to waste time thinking up a new subject for their response, and indeed it doesn't make sense to force them to do so.
I think there is a class of users for which using "Re: " by default is the right solution. I'm happy to implement this as a separate, optional module, only I'm relatively new to programming Drupal so I wouldn't know where to begin writing a module which would muck around with the internals of a different module. My guess is that I'd have to add a module_invoke_all("comment", "edit", ) hook somewhere inside comment.module to allow my module to muck with the default values of the edit form. Is that the right approach.
In the meantime, here's a new patch against 4.4.0-rc.
Comment #3
gábor hojtsyIMHO if you implement this as an optional setting (ie. the admin can set if the re: will be default or not), then it has a better chance to get accepted. The default should be the current behaviour (no re: prepending, no default subject).
Comment #4
moshe weitzman commentedComment #5
jonbob commentedDup of http://drupal.org/node/view/5378