I just subscribed to the newsgroup: dk.test on my newsserver (news.inet.tele.dk). There is plenty of room to write the full newsgroup name but Mozilla insists on calling the newsgroup: d.test Build 2000011008

Scott, you hooked this up, right?

Putterman, do we have any rules for abbreviating the newsgroup name? I thought that no matter how short for the newsgroup name, once we set up the account setup for displaying abbreviation names, and it will display abbreviate names, isn't it?

it currently always abbreviates or never abbreviates depending on your pref. I have no plans to change this any time soon since as far as I know I have no way of knowing about size in the tree.

marking helpwanted. and marking M20. I'm pretty sure that I will never fix this but am willing to advise.

moving to future milestone for review for a later product release

Suggest adding keyword 4xp since 4.x only abbreviated newsgroup names if necessary.

i am using build 2001080110 on Windows NT and it also truncates the newsgroup name comp.news.networkworld.netflash is displayed as c.n.n.netflash it seems that it just gets the first letter of each parent, add a dot and the last word to display the newsgroup name

We could go a long way to reducing complaints on this issue by showing tooltip/help text of the full name as you moused over. And by hooking up some UI for the pref

I agree that the "tooltip/help text" helps, but it is a bandaid approach to a poor design. When you have, perhaps, dozens of newsgroups in your list it quickly becomes very frustrating to find out what the real names are. Turning off abbreviation in the prefs just abbreviates the end of the string, with is worse still. If you're trying to win back netscape 4.7x users as well as new ones, you should at least have taken the best functions from 4.7x and used them.

I suggest the following rule for the abbreviation if someone can implement it (manage to get the size of the tree): Try to display everything If can't, start by cutting all words from n-1 position to position 1. If can't, cut the last word (position n) as well If can't, shorten last word and abbreviate all others to first leter. This may make it more clear and can be used as test case: e.g. for a newsgroup called fooo.ooooo.baaaaaar f| f.| f..| f...| f... | f.o...| f.o... | f.o.b...| f.o.ba...| f.o.baa...| f.o.baaa...| f.o.baaaaaar| fo.o.baaaaaar| foo.o.baaaaaar| fooo.o.baaaaaar| fooo.oo.baaaaaar| fooo.ooo.baaaaaar| fooo.oooo.baaaaaar| fooo.ooooo.baaaaaar| If you think it should be different, please comment. BTW, the choice of abbreviating of not should be hooked in the UI.

That's bass-ackward. The current scheme correctly preserves the final node as the most significant part of the newsgroup name, it simply abbreviates too aggressively. You can't think of foo.bar.baz in isolation, there are likely related groups foo.bar.bat and so on. Think of the netscape.public.mozilla.* hierarchy. Repeating "netscape.public.mozilla" is just noise, and the n.p.m. abbreviation is appropriate. But the current scheme turns ca.driving, ca. politics, comp.databases and comp.lang.javascript into c.databasesc.driving c.l.javascript c.politics completely obscuring the fact that the c's are different, even when there is room for the full forms. Given the ability to determine the width of the tree (I'm not holding out hope) it should start abbreviating at the first node, then the next, etc. Note that there is a per-server pref to eliminate abbreviation entirely, but there's no UI for it. We should expose at least the global "mail.server.default.abbreviate" in the UI.

*** Bug 105628 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I believe a UI pref is neccessary as are tooltips. I get bitten by this bug because I'm subscribed to two newsgroups, iol.general and ie.general, both of which appear as i.general so I have no idea which one I'm about to open.

A UI for this would be ridiculous, we should provide visible UI only for those prefs that do matter. I don't consider whether the newsgroups-names should be truncated or not to be one of them. However, I think it sounds like an excellent idea to make the folderpane 'smart' and figure out if it should unabbreviate the groups upon resizing the splitter - so if the names would fit, they will expand to use the full newsgroupname.

reassigning to sspitzer. Yeah, we defintely need to make this smarter based on the amount of space available. Numerous alorithms have been posted in the newsgroups.

Adding 4xp keyword since 4x had this, at least 4,7x on windows. It basically did the same thing that is done now in moz if you make the pane really narrow, except the "..." is in the middle instead of the right side. Is the current behaviour (the ... bit) a core function of the outliner, or is this done with xul/javascript? Can it be fixed using Gerv's Patch Maker?

*** Bug 133956 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Just got an idea for some more algorithm. What about about splitting the name of a newsgroup in severla parts on the dots. And then make a tree like this: -+netscape -+public -+mozilla - browser - docs - wishlist -"some more netscape-ng" -+micro$oft - 666 - Billy the Kid This way we sould run into trouble with newsgroup-names. They would need to be extremely long that this scheme wouldn't work and then we could still combine it with the good algorithms proposed above. Another feature of it would be, that the newsgoups would be sorted (and if you have many "hideawayable") the way, too.

*** Bug 156413 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Re: comment 18, That's bug 38931.

Only truncated if there is no room for the full name. Make all Fields resizeable.

I think the solution of NS4.x - only truncated if there is no room for the full name is the best. Most Users have 1024x768 ore more. So the most Newsgruop can read complete. (See Attachment/jpg)

*** Bug 176594 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I once read somewhere, either in an other bug, or somewhere in the newsgroups, on how make the newsgroup listing not ever be truncated with a pref change. Does anyone know how to do this.

I was going to add a bug for this too. It is most annoying not being able to figure out the newsgroup name even when you widen the column width.

Looks like ns4 implementation uses truncation 'in the middle'. I vote for this solution because this is the best way to solve the 2 most important issues: - same abbreviation, but different names at begin of name string are confusing - the last string component is most important if it is the only difference ;) Since I'm not a dev. its not my part to say this is a blocker, especially since its more an enhancement than a bug. Still I'd like that to be fixed ;-)

Perhaps, somebody has to take a look at NS 4.x source code (as released in 1998)...

(In reply to comment #24) > I once read somewhere, either in an other bug, or somewhere in the newsgroups, > on how make the newsgroup listing not ever be truncated with a pref change. > > Does anyone know how to do this. If you use Mozilla, type 'about:config' in the url bar and type 'abbreviate' and change 'news.server.default.abbreviate' to 'false'. (needless to say, if you use TB, you have to edit prefs.js manually). Then, you'll get exactly what NS 4.x did (comment #21 and comment #26). My previous comment (comment #27) should be ignored. I should have tried setting the pref. to false before writting it. Given this, is this bug still valid? Or, should we morph it to 'change the default for newsgroup abbreviation to false' or 'add UI for this pref'?

(In reply to comment #28) > If you use Mozilla, type 'about:config' in the url bar and type 'abbreviate' and > change 'news.server.default.abbreviate' to 'false'. (needless to say, if you use Seems that the value name changed to mail.server.default.abbreviate, that's what I see in SeaMonkey 1.0.4 and Mozilla 1.7.12, but it works as you described. > TB, you have to edit prefs.js manually). Then, you'll get exactly what NS 4.x > did (comment #21 and comment #26). Current releases of Thunderbird allow to open a similar window to about:config (Edit>Preferences>General>Config Editor button) but nothing is displayed when I type in abbreviate... > Given this, is this bug still valid? Or, should we morph it to 'change the > default for newsgroup abbreviation to false' or 'add UI for this pref'? I think that this bug is still valid. SeaMonkey and Thunderbird should, IMHO (simple SeaMonkey end user) manage the truncation automatically, displaying as much of the newsgroup name as possible according to the available place. Even with the option we're talking about, we're far from what's displayed in the attached screenshot of NS4. BTW, shouldn't the product field be changed to Core or something else instead of Mozilla Application Suite?

WFM => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.9.1pre) Gecko/20090614 SeaMonkey/2.0b1pre If you disagree on how exactly the newsgroup names are abbreviated please file a new bug for that particular issue.