Thread hijacking

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thread hijacking is the act of trying to steer a web forum discussion thread off topic by discussing a subject entirely unrelated to the subject at hand.

While this can be an intentional act of trolling, it is often accidental - caused by other participants in the discussion responding to a throwaway remark, taking the thread off at a tangent to the original subject matter. The results, whilst sometimes humorous or otherwise interesting, often provoke a feeling of resentment from the author of the original post.

[edit] Thread Hijacking on a mailing list or newsgroup

Many people find that they are scolded on a list or newsgroup for thread hijacking despite the fact that they changed the subject line, which would seem to them to create a new thread. Most news and mail readers use other headers such as "References:" to track and build the thread of messages by message ID, and changing the subject line does not change the actual threading in many news or email readers. Therefore, one should always compose a new (and therefore reference-free) message when changing topics. Alternatively one can start a new thread for the new topic and link to the previous thread.