I'm not entirely sure I understand what you are getting at, but here are
my comments.

Making any change to a group (set of messages with the same title) would
of course require sending another message to that group.  Reopening the
group would require in some way marking this new message in a way that
BFAV (at least client and probably both server and client) understand
that this action is to be performed.

Basically this could be done by simply adding to the existing protocol. 
Where we currently have a '[closed]' tag you could add a '[reopen]'
tag.  Now it's not absolutely essential that the server be modified to
support this; you could always search for tags on the client side. 
However for efficiency reasons it makes sense to repeat processing as
few times as possible which is why the server side looks for tags once
and only once and sets a bitmask in the message list so that the client
has to do less work to make these decisions.  In which case if the
community desires the ability to reopen groups then I would be quite
happy to add the desired functionality to the server side which should
only take a few minutes.  We just need to work out the details and
coordinate.  We also need to keep in mind what havok this may cause to
users still using older versions of the BFAV2 client and what if
anything we can do about that.  Of course it wouldn't be the first time
we have to force everyone to upgrade.

Let me know.

By the way I'm on IRC during US daylight hours nearly every weekday. 
You can generally find me in #squeak but even if I'm not there I may
still be on the server which you can find out with the /whois command.

Ken

On Sat, 2004-08-07 at 10:18, Thomas Koenig wrote:
> Does anyone already know why we can't we re-open a BFAV bug report?  
> At first I'd assumed that it was a "policy" decision, but based on
> folks' comments that’s not the case.
> My next guess was that it's because we cannot "rewrite an email". I'm
> treating the BFAV server side as a black box and so I assume this to be
> a given.
> Now I'm wondering if reopening posts is a solvable problem on the client
> side. I've been experimenting with ways to split and regroup posts from
> the client side already.  Regrouping faces similar problems and
> potential solutions.  In both cases, if we solve the problem on the
> client side it involves duplicating posts.  So if there is something I
> can invoke on the server side to update a post that would be helpful.
> Any insights about "why we cann't re-open a BFAV post" would be
> appreciated.
> Tom

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