When WinVN threading is enabled, via the Compute Threads option of the Config Article-list options, you will see the subject title of the oldest base note for each conversation displayed, followed by a series of thread depth indented marks. You can choose the thread depth indicator character in the Config Aticle-List options. Each indented mark indicates that an article was entered as a response to the previous article. Since News Servers typically age out old articles and WinVN allows you to fetch only the "latest" series of articles on a server, you may not have all articles that make up a full thread. In that case, the Subject line may begin with “RE:” indicating that the base article of the thread was actually a response to another article that is no longer on your local server. Note that if WinVN detects that your news server supports XOVER (an efficient references transfer mechanism), WinVN will automatically enable threading, and ignore your Enable Threads selection.
In the above example, article 6050 was a response to article 6024. Article 6027 was a response to 6022 while articles 6022 and 6048 were both responses to the same article which has scrolled off the screen. Notice the large gaps in article numbers. This indicates the number of non-related intervening conversations that were being discussed in this newsgroup that you would need to filter thru if you did not have the ability to sort via threads.