Thread Hijacking - Let's all try to improve by not doing this.

Pilots,

I'd request that pilots consider whether their posts are responses to an existing topic or a new topic before they post to the forum. Please start a new topic in the appropriate forum if you're post is not directly related ie. responding to the original topic. Otherwise a forum thread will go on and on and your topic will be difficult to find in the future when it might be helpful to others later on.

This process is referred to as hijacking a thread, where a topic is started but a reply to that topic is "off topic" and should have been started as a separate thread (a new topic). The result is that the original topic and the "off topic" all get mixed together and it's difficult to later sort through to find the information you wanted because the original topic information is mixed in with the "off topic" stuff and the "off topic" thread may not ever be found in a topic search because it only exists as a reply to an unrelated topic.

I've been relatively lax on dealing with topic hijacking, and have been guilty of this myself because it's easier to reply to a topic than start a new topic, but I hope that this explains why this is a bad idea and we should all work on trying to keep hijacking to a minimum if not stop it altogether.

Thanks for your cooperation with this. While I and other forum moderators can always move topics around later, it would be much easier if the original poster would put the post in the correct place to start with.

John