andrew.bernard@gmail.com writes:
So the issue is, how do I stop my users from this practice of replying and changing the subject?
This is frequently called "thread hijacking." But be thankful that they at least change the Subject! My worry is more people who start in on a completely new subject without doing it, and then complain that they get ignored because they're off-topic for the thread.
I suppose there is no way except education.
That's right. If you had the resources of a major AI lab, you could probably train up a classifier to do the job fairly well, but in practice it's a matter for human judgment. Eg, I know that I frequently change the Subject: several posts after others have, eh, "evolved" the subject into a completely different thing :-), so it's useful to have proper threading across the subject change.[1]
One practice I found effective was to impose moderation on people who just couldn't practice proper netiquette, then reduce moderation frequency to once a week. ;-) A week is probably overkill. :-รพ (I happened to be in a period of frequent travel for two weeks and at the beginning of that period there was this jerk.... He learned.) Once-a-day moderation is sufficiently frustrating for most people to be an effective re-education tool.
Steve
Footnotes: [1] There was a day and age *sigh* when educated people would *frequently* change the subject to reflect the subject of the *message* rather than the subject of the *thread*. That's gone the way of traditional inlined replies are going, though.