Maintaining Off-Topic Discussion (Alternative to Moving Messages)

Here is a potential solution to manage off-topic conversations that seems like it would be less problematic than moving messages between channels:

1) Moderators have the ability to select a range of messages (the off-topic conversation) and a "collapse" command to package them into a discrete unit. Once collapsed, these messages can be expanded at any time by other users if they choose to read the off-topic conversation.

2) At the end of the collapsed group of messages, moderators may optionally provide a link to the first message in another channel where the discussion continues.

It seems that this would address most issues with off-topic posts, and would be simpler and less problematic than allowing moderators to move messages. This would do a lot to clean up channels without also deleting valuable messages.

For example, a server I belong to has a #memes channel and earlier today somebody posted an image that led to a rather long and thoughtful discussion.  Somebody pointed out the conversation was off-topic and asked that we continue the conversation in another channel. The conversation moved, but now we have a cluttered channel and a disjointed conversation. If our moderators could collapse the off-topic conversation and provide a link to the first message that continues the conversation in the correct channel then everyone would be happy.