[orca-list] Thread Hijacking

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

We have a "teachable moment" on our hands, and luckily it's not related 
to recent events in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Instead, it has to do 
with thread hijacking.

We're experiencing the confusion that happens when someone decides to 
hijack a thread to discuss a new issue.  The result is that is becomes 
very hard to track the discussion.  For example, we currently have a 
thread where no fewer than three issues are being discussed:

1) José Vilmar Estácio de Souza's original problem: "more than one	blank 
space are not recognized in thunderbird"

2) A new addition (the first "hijack"):
"Do you hear the punctuation mark spoken twice?"

3) Another addition (the second "hijack"): "Orca is throwing in full 
stops all over the place"

The impact?  José's original problem has been swallowed.

By the time I see a hijack occur, it's too late. It's been hijacked and 
I cannot undo the harm it has caused. What I do, however, is change the 
subject so that someone looking at the message list summary in the list 
archives will be able to see make some sense of what was being 
discussed.  That is, the message still appears in the original thread, 
but at least the subject has been changed to indicate it is not related 
to the original content.

So...the teachable thing is this: instead of doing a reply and hijacking 
a thread to discuss a new issue, the preferred way would be to compose a 
new message using the "New Message" feature of your e-mail client.

Will

PS - For those not familiar with message threading, take a look at 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2009-August/thread.html#00209. 
You will see a summary of the Orca list discussion for August 2009. The 
messages are shown by a set of nested lists where the nesting indicates 
a message was written as a reply to the outer list item.

Thread "openers" are the outer most list items and are the ones where 
someone wrote a message directly "To:" the Orca list by using the "New 
message" feature of their e-mail client.

The rest of the messages are where someone used the "Reply" button. Note 
that the e-mail system is clever enough to know that you pressed the 
reply button.  That is, even if you change the subject to something 
completely different, you won't fool the system into thinking you didn't 
press the "Reply" button.  So, if you're really not replying and staying 
on the topic of a specific thread, don't press the "Reply" button. 
Instead, write a new message using the "New Message" feature.