I complained about this, too. But apparently what the bug actually is, is that you can enter the watch commnd, but the watch symbol won't appear until after the first reply is entered and there are now two message. They say it was set up this way because a thread doesn't exist until there is a reply to the first message.
Sounds kinda mathematical to me - "Can have a line with only one point." See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=142932 No One wrote: > Ever since Netscape 6.x was released the WATCH option has never worked > correctly in netwsgroups. Now in Mozilla RC3 the WACTH function is still > not perfect. If you post a message and then retrieve new messages you > can not WATCH that message until someone else first posts a reply to it. > Kind of defeats the purpose of the WATCH function. > >
