Really? Always?
I ask because there have been times when I wanted to add something to a thread that wasn’t dead-on the subject, but concerned the subject in some way.
Lately, though I have used the phrase “slight detour”.
So is it okay or should I start a whole new thread?
Thanks
Quasi
How 'bout them Redskins, eh? 
Big hijacks are mainly a Great Debates problem. That’s the forum where people are the most serious about talking, and where you’re the most likely to get yelled at for hijacking a thread. It also occasionally happens in GQ, where someone will post a question about heart attacks, which will remind you that you always wondered about phlebitis. In GQ, you should generally start another thread to ask about phlebitis, mainly because the people who know about phlebitis aren’t going to know your question is there, because the thread title says “heart attacks”.
In the other forums, hijacks aren’t usually that much of a problem. People manage to deal with it.
You can always add a single off-topic comment to any thread in any forum by clearly labeling it, thus:
[hijack]
blah blah blah doo-wah diddy blah blah blah anthrax blah blah blah
[/hijack]
Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about your hijack taking over a thread, but sometimes there is. It sometimes depends on how you phrase the hijack. If you say something like, “I just wanna point out that…”, that’s different from picking up the thread and putting it on an entirely new track, as in, “I know this has nothing to do with infant baptism, but, whatever happened to the Albigensians?” Here you’re clearly starting a whole new line of discussion, rather than simply making a slightly off-topic comment.
And if you do discover that a comment that was intended to be merely a comment has mushroomed into a full-blown discussion, has inadvertently hijacked the entire thread, and it doesn’t seem likely that the OP is ever going to get back on track, the polite thing to do is to apologize to the OP and start a new thread, posting a link to it in the old thread, “Well, let’s continue this discussion of the Albigensians over here…”
Usually if the hijack is that bad, somebody else in the thread will “strongly suggest” that you start a new thread. Sometimes it’s phrased coyly, like, “Hey, you two, get a room or something…” When somebody says that, he’s not talking about hotels, 'kay? 