Topic thread
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A topic thread (or simply "thread" when used in context) is means of grouping messages or postings to a bulletin board, newsgroup, mailing list, hypermail, blog or Internet forum, all relating to a single topic. Generally this is achieved by treating every message other than than the root message in a topic as a reply to a previous message, and indicating, either graphically or by indentation, that this is so. A thread therefore becomes a series of related conversations, with a heirarchical tree view showing how the messages are interconnected, much like a directory structure.
An e-mail client or news client is said to have "threaded topics" if it groups messages on the same topic together for easy reading in this manner.
Open thread
An open thread, which at one time was referred to as noodles, can refer to a blog post where readers may comment and discuss any topic that they choose.
Open threads are usually more useful on popular blogs with large amounts of traffic; they are often used when the author of the blog has no subject matter to post on or when there is a lull in posting.
Open threads are also used to break up the monotony of posts on the main pages of blogs. Comments may build up on content-oriented posts; therefore, authors use the open threads so page load times won't be slowed down.
See also
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