In article , Janet Baraclough
wrote:

The message
from Stan The Man contains these words:


I have no objection to a brief diversion but I do object when the
diversion takes over the thread and snowballs. I would therefore be
grateful if the extended in-chatting could be taken elsewhere.

You started the thread with a somewhat off-topic-for-urg question
about the efficiency of waterboards.

How mischievous and intentionally misleading of you. Try re-reading my
initial post which was quite obviously an enquiry about hosepipe bans -
a topic which is almost exclusively relevant to this newsgroup.

The thread contains 29 posts
divided as follows:

Water-related 16
Tennis 2
Strawberries and cream 1
Naturism 5
Posting/Netiquette 5

The last was an off-topic-for-the-thread diversion from your
offtopic-for-urg question about water board efficiency, but since you
introduced it you can't really complain.

A total of 21 posts were about the topics introduced by yourself.

I suggest you do a recount. There were 12 off-topic posts (tennis,
swimming costumes, etc) prior to my post about netiquette. At that time
therefore 50 percent of the posts were off-topic - including 100
percent of the recent posts.

But the details aren't very important. If people want to chatter on
about something off-topic, the polite thing to do is take it private
or, at worst, start a new thread, instead of hijacking other people's
threads.

You can try to be as smart-alec as you like but nothing you may say can
make bad netiquette good.