Cross

My contention is that even in the flawed world in which we live it is better than the alternatives.

True, and unfortunate -- and point taken! Note, though, that most decent newsreaders will (or at least can) follow threads by message ID rather than subject so while a change of subject is helpful it won't prevent automatic collection of drifted messages.

Besides, some of the most useful and interesting things I've learned on usenet have been from postings that had *nothing* to do with the original thread subject. Drift isn't necessarily bad.

Troll will do as trolls will do -- and that includes ignoring a followup that someone else has set. I don't thing that should be allowed to affect the behaviour of the rest of us.

If the subject really was of sufficient interest to warrant crossposting it in the first place than I would say that it deserved to continue to live in all three so that all who saw the original posting could continue to benefit from the discussion -- remember that some of them may not subscribe to the followup group you might have set and would probably not bother to go there just to follow one interesting thread.

.. but here I am rabbitting on again. Apologies.

Cheers, Daniel.