Cross-thread replies?

Hi, Percy.Your Topic Reminder to Big Al on the thread about Scalia got me wondering if there would be a way to link posts and responses across threads. For example, if someone wanted to respond to Big Al, their response would appear in a different thread, but still contain a reply notification linking it back to the original comment.A generic "Reply in a Different Thread" button is probably just asking for a mess, but perhaps there's some programmer wizardry you could come up with that would let moderators "tag" an off-topic post such that all responses are automatically shunted to a designated thread where it is on-topic, and a reply notification is left behind?I have no programming experience, so maybe this isn't as simple or as useful as it seems to me; but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway.