Thread Hijacking

From Free net encyclopedia

Thread hijacking is the act of taking a forum discussion thread wildly 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 often humourous, often extract a feeling of resentment from the author of the post.

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. 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.