I’m fairly new to the SDMB, and I have noticed that some posts have the word “hijack” at the top. I was wondering if anyone could explain this to me…please.
No, really, I’m losing sleep…HEEEEEELP!
The hijack notice is what some people will include when the post they’re making is a diversion from the original subject, but related through some free association. Occasionally a thread continues along the hijack trajectory, while most often they amount to asides.
Some folks are uptight about them, most are not; as I meant to say above, most often an interesting thread will right itself even after sustaining the growth of a brranch.
It’s just message board good manners to announce when you are implementing a hijack, as in [hijack] at the beginning and [/hijack] at the end. This lets the other posters in the thread know that YOU know that the subject at hand in the OP is really “national health care” and NOT “my gall bladder operation” or “this creep I met at the blood donor place”.
The hijack function allows you to politely change the subject for a minute in order to relate an anecdote or illustration that doesn’t necessarily address the OP, without getting jumped on by everybody else.
You can also use hijack to talk to someone in the thread about something personal between the two of you, e.g.:
[hijack]
Beatle, are you really from Liverpool?
[/hijack]
Like that. Then if Beatle feels so inclined, on her next post she can answer me, without the rest of the thread getting real irritable with the both of us.
The [/hijack] part was invented right here at the DSMB.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to look it up.
(In other words, I couldn’t make the search thing work with the virgule.)