This may work in theory, however two issues arise, 1) in many cases these threads snowball once hijacked and are seldom caught at the first sign of a so called hijack. Even if it is caught in its infancy, it would take Randy or designee time to contact the poster who is/has causing the problem, request his/her edit, have the poster in question make the edit etc.. in the mean time there are numerous posts to the one in question and the thread is hijacked as you call it. However the problem then becomes having a bunch of people who subsequently responded edit their posts which takes even more time.. Its much more efficient for Randy or designee to lock it.. if it truly is a worthy topic it will come back to life. I can't recall one topic shut down that probably didn't deserve it.. Maybe there was, but I dont' recall it.
2) I truly don't believe most of the threads that are what you call hijacked are just that... hijacked.. I think they stray way off topic at times but oh well that is just the cost of doing business here or someone posts something that another FT doesn't like, or feels is offensive and either a flame war, arguement or something happens but it happens gradually and feeds of each of the preceeding posts. I don't believe that FT'ers go out of their way and intentionally say I'm going to shut this thread down by hijacking it.. Off topic oh yeah... intentional hijacking.. I don't believe so..
<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by PG:
The issue is not about a post which any FTer finds offensive. The issue is about a post which Randy (or designee) finds offensive enough to take some action.
In the end, I see locking a thread is probably the most efficient way to handle this. to moderate close enough to force timely edits is probably not possible.
The question then is what should the action be. If the action is to simply close that thread, then it is an open invitation for people to hijack threads that they do not like.
I see no problem with Randy (or designee) asking a FTer to edit their comments (especially when the comments clearly violate the TOS). That, to me, is far preferable than locking the thread.</font>