Brad,
Thanks for your very polite and instructive response. I knew about the
reasons for not hijacking a thread (threaded email readers, ignore
thread settings etc) because of some unnecessarily sharp reproof by some
of the "hijacked thread police" on this list. What I was asking is for
those who issue such reproof to be less strident.
You and others who, among the recent couple of dozen or so posts, posted
about reasons for not thread hijacking have been very polite, but there
are some who helped put some of us in touch with our already "too-strong
feelings of inadequacy" as some of the pop psychology books might put it.
I agree that the politically correct police can take a long walk off a
short pier.
Thanks again.
David
Brad Rogers wrote:
On Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:37:52 -0400
David B Teague <[email protected]> wrote:
Hello David,
It would be better if the thread hijacking police and political
Thread hijacking doesn't help anyone, including the perpetrator. If
anyone has set their MUA to "ignore thread" for a topic that gets
hijacked, the offender has already limited the number of people reading
their post, with a potential loss of answers to any query they might
have.
I suppose it can be argued that taking over a thread like that is akin
to walking into a room where two or more people are having a
conversation and interrupting and changing the subject without even
waiting for a lull in that conversation.
Of course, there are plenty of people that are unaware that simply
hitting reply to a message and changing the subject doesn't _genuinely_
start a new thread. It just seems that way in mailers like OE. Why?
Because although OE doesn't use the references headers for threading, it
transports them correctly. Some MUAs allow the user to select "ignore
references" when replying, thus creating a new thread. Whether OE can
do this, I have no idea.
The pol. cor. police can, of course, take a long walk off a short
pier. :-)
