thread policy

[Julia Thompson]

On Mon, 19 May 2008, David Hobby wrote:

> No, I'm not quite sure what William means by thread
> hijacking.  The best I found on that is Wikipedia:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_hijacking
>
> It means one of two things.  One is "talking about
> something else without changing the subject line".
> That seems to be pretty common here.  : )
>
> The other is "sending a new message by replying
> to an old one and changing the subject line".  The
> complaint there is that most email readers will show
> the new message as being in the same thread as the
> old message on a different subject that was replied
> to.  I'm probably guilty of this myself, since I
> seldom use threading when reading email discussions.
> (I tend to just go by the subject lines.)
>
> Does anyone view the latter meaning of "thread
> hijacking" as a problem?

Yes.

I'm quite willing to put up with it when it's a computer-illiterate mother 
of triplets (who also has a bad habit of posting to the list we're on when 
she means to just send something to *one* person *offlist*), but sheesh, 
if you've been getting something resembling enough sleep sometime in the 
past 7 or 8 years, learn to use your e-mail *properly*, especially when 
you have people actively offering to help you.

(I don't use e-mail threading even where I have it as a feature, but Yahoo 
does it by default, so if I'm reading stuff from a Yahoo group at Yahoo, 
that ends up being a problem at times.  And, the list I'm on with A. is, 
in fact, a Yahoo group, so I *see* the problem a lot of the time.  (The 
client I'm having to use for that address forces me to top-post, which I 
don't like, so I log onto Yahoo to reply to stuff on a regular basis.))

So, yeah, I view the latter meaning of "thread hijacking" as a problem, 
and there are people I'll cut some slack for on that sort of thing, but 
they all have at least 2 children.

 	Julia