I see several categories of thread drift.
- Some single word or phrase triggers someones thoughts and this person starts a whole new subject within the same thread. (How creative.)
- Someone sees a joke in something and off we go, one after the other L-O-L.
- Someone is of opinion that the debate gets too heated and cuts off discussion by throwing in a joke.
- Someone has the mean, for some reason, to frustrate a thread and throws in a sick joke or kicks the person instead of playing the ball.

It is not always and immediately easy to perceive the mechanism at hand. And it is even not always a bad thing. Moreover, several people may have a different opinion about whether it is drift or not.

Michel initially thought that my reaction (see some messages in this thread back) was a thread drift. I don't agree. I imagine that he rather felt under attack and that his initial - outward - response was 'ahh thread drift!', since he and his employees appear to have done some statistical datamining on this subject recently, which makes one 'sensitive' to the idea that it explains a lot, if not all. While I think that such research is worth the effort, I also think that it's difficult to draw conclusions that help the moderator when moderating. One should at least get aware of the categories and their seriousness. As I said, not all drift is bad.

An idea might be to give the starter of the thread some privilege in this too. Although I don't see how this could be implemented easily.

As for the Arabic version thread.. Imo, it was a clear example of a thread that might have been moved in part to the chatter section. Otoh, it was a political debate and one might wonder whether the ut is a place for such debates. Or wasn't it a political debate?



>Hi Nadya,
>
>The thing is how to decide where to split and how much. Also, it would probably take a UT person many hours of reading through threads (or branches of them) and trying to make those decisions. I can't think of an effective automated way of handling it, but it definately is a problem. I will respond to the message, regardless of the thread title.
>
>
>>There was an example quite recently (though there are lots of examples of this sort). Somebody asked a question about implementing arabic in VFP. It was called "Arabic version" or something along these lines. And then Martin Emre (?) switched it completely and it became a political battle very quickly. But the originator of the thread still kept the original topic and Ken Levy responded. I really wished there would be a mechanism to split.
>>
>>>
>>>No, because if we would do that it would become a real mess.
>>>
>>>For example, some would want to keep it as is so they can read everything even if it's a change of topic. Some, after such a potential thread break, would discuss about the initial topic even in the thread break portion which would make it impossible to link back to the original thread. Those are some reasons given as examples.