Pluto Help

The Original Pluto help files plus extras

This page up to date on: 19 Apr 2024
FILE: threads-display
From: Jonathan Duddington 
Subject: Threads display
Date: Wed, 08 Mar 2000 20:45
Source: docs

(Pluto version 2 only)

Message "threading" is where articles are displayed or found according to
their relation to other articles, as given in the "References: " or
"In-Reply-To: " lines in their headers.

Threads Display
===============

The "Threads" sorting type can be used to display articles by "threads". 
This is similar to the "Newsgroups" sorting type but:

a.  Articles within a thread are indented to display their relationships.
 An article is indented one level more than its parent.  (The parent
being the article to which this one is a reply).

b.  A "thread" can contain messages which have different Subject titles,
i.e. if the Subject changes during the course of the thread.

Although the articles are arranged in a hierarchy, selecting an article
and applying an operation such as a status change will apply the
operation only to the individual selected article and not also to its
descendants.  If you want to apply an operation to a branch of the
hierarchy, use CTRL-A to select the required articles.  CTRL-A will
select the current article and its descendants.

You can toggle threading on and off in an article list by changing its
sorting type between "Threads" and "Newsgroups", using the Sorting menu
in the article list button bar.

Threading may not work as well for Mail as it does for News, since some
mail clients don't add a References: or In-Reply-To: header line when
they send mail replies.  If an article does not have such a header line,
or if its parent article is not currently stored in Pluto, then it will
appear at the left-most indentation level.

In some cases, the number of indentation levels can be large.  Pluto can
show 16 levels, including the first two which are for Newsgroup and
Thread-subject.  It may be helpful to shift the article listing in a
thread to the left or right (i.e. decreasing or increasing the
indentation levels) by using CTRL-I and CTRL-SHIFT-I respectively.


References Button
=================

The Article Viewer window includes a "References" button.

This shows a menu of:

a.  The parent references of the article (i.e. the articles to which this
is a reply).  These are shown with their Date and Author.  But if the
article is not stored in Pluto, then just a message-id is shown.

b.  "Siblings" - articles which are also replies to the same immediate
parent.  The current article is shown in the Siblings list with a tick
beside it.

c.  "Replies" - these are articles which are replies to the current
article.

If an article in the menu is a Log Copy of a message that you've sent,
this is indicated by a � (bar) symbol to the left of the Author.

You can move between articles by clicking on an entry in the References
menu.  This will replace the current article in the Article Viewer by the
selected one.  If the selected article is not in the article list from
which the Article Viewer was originally opened, then it's opened into an
Additional Article Viewer. 

You can use Shift-click to open an article from the menu into a new
Additional Article Viewer.

If an article is not stored in Pluto (i.e. it's shown in the menu only by
its message-id) then if clicked on, Pluto will send a URL request to the
browser to look it up in Deja-news.

The articles which are shown in the References menu may have been found
in any of Pluto's Boxes.  This can include the Bin box if the article has
recently been deleted.


Message-ids in the Text
=======================

Clicking with the Menu button on a message-id in a text window (eg. an
"In article..." attribution or the References: line in the message
header) will open the URL menu.  This includes choices to open the
corresponding article in an Additional Article Viewer, or to look it up
in Deja-news.
<= Help Index
Please note that Pluto is supplied with a more comprehensive and up-to-date StrongHelp manual than these text files. Select Help… in Pluto’s iconbar menu.