Linus Virus Scanner

[Andre Costa]

Hi John,

On Sun, 8 Feb 2004 20:56:58 -0500
"John Li" <johnli at ahlt.net> wrote:

> > Thread hijacking, 'untrimmed' posts etc. _are_ indeed a 
> > serious problem
> 
> On the subject of 'thread hijacking', much needless bandwidth
> has been taken up criticizing 'thread hijacking', when  poor
> thread-tracking software appears to be at fault.  If the subject
> line has been changed, a new thread should be considered
> to be created.  In other areas, it is common practice to reply
> to an email in order to get the target address and use the
> correct sender's email, but change the subject line and the
> content.  This behavior will probably not change--we should
> avoid the programmer's pitfall of making users' habits fit
> the software, and instead make software fit users' habits.

While I agree that smarter software would decrease the incidence of
thread hijacking on this specific case (i.e. the poster indeed wanted to
start a new thread while sending the message to a specific recipient),
this doesn't mean that we should not treat it (thread hijacking) as a
problem in the absence of such software when it doesn't fit the profile
you described.

Besides, it is hardly the case with mailing lists, since any reply will
not go directly to the sender, but instead to the ML because of the
'Reply-To' field (as expected). If you watch thread hijacking on this ML
(and I guess on any other), almost all of it is simply (unintentional)
bad use -- i.e. the user did not really want to _reply_, but instead to
_post a new thread_. So, IMHO there is indeed a lot of bad users' habits
out there, and this is why I believe it is important to point it out
when it happens.

Best,

Andre

-- 
Andre Oliveira da Costa