Necro-Posting

[Yonkey]

I've been considering disallowing people to revive really old threads, because in most cases the revival is for no good reason. 

Basically, I'd disallow posting in any thread who's last post is older than 6 months from the current date.  This will ensure people only post in current threads.  And of course, if there is a dire need to revive an old thread, people can create a new one linking to the old.  Depending on the activity, a mod can then decide to merge this new thread with the old one or no.

Anyway, this is just my opinion.  I was wondering how many of you are in support or oppose necro-posting?


EDIT: I am now considering 6 months, rather than 30 days. 

[Rosella]

I'm opposed to reviving old threads, but only after I find and revive the singing thread.

[Jafar]

I support it. On one hand, it is annoying when topics that haven't been posted in for who knows how long get bumped back to the top for irrevelant reasons. (*Pokes OB* )
But on the other hand, some of the topics that fall down through the pages still have alot life in them.

[Storm]

I've nothing against thread resurrection, as long as the resurrector actually has something important/relevent to add besides spam or off-topic comments.
Regrettably, that doesn't happen very often

I'd disallow posting in any thread who's last post is older than 30 days from the current date.  This will ensure people only post in current threads.  And of course, if there is a dire need to revive an old thread, people can create a new one linking to the old.  Depending on the activity, a mod can then decide to merge this new thread with the old one or no.

This method sounds good... but I'd make it longer than 30 days. I mean, I was gone for a month and when I came back there were a bunch of threads I wanted to post on, but that red "You're trying to post in an OLD thread!!" warning message scared me away

[racx_00]

Yeah maybe a bit longer than 30 days for people that don't make it , but yeah definitely a good idea

[Zelly]

Being fairly new to the site, I think that some thread revival should be allowed, because sometimes a newbie might come along with a great idea/opinion, but he or she won't be able to post it because the thread is old.

Also what happens to the fan-art/fan-fiction threads then? Sometimes it takes awhile to get out the next creative masterpiece.

[koko_99_2001]

I'm thinking for anything older than six months or a year. For only thirty days to six months, I don't really support. Too bad you can't get it to disallow the one sentence revivals...

[Drunken Chinchilla]

I think 3 months would be acceptable. And also if threads are revived for no good reason I think we should nuke all messages after the uneccesary revival 

If theres an old topic that someone REALLY wants to reply to surely they could just make a request in this section of the forum too?

[Warlock]

I support Necro-posting for the very good reason that if a thread is created, it doesn't matter if the person(s) who started it are long since gone or if the thread died out, it only matters if someone has something relavent to add to the thread. But I also think it depends on the nature of the thread, like say, if the thread discusses an event long since passed, and someone resurrects that just to increase their post count? SHAME ON THEM - but if you have a thread which purpose is not bound to the time of it's creation, then by all means let people continue it even long after it's been dead - and why? Because even old threads need new life, and please do not just create new threads with the same subject, we already have too much of that, as long as the thread is there it doesn't matter if it's been dead for a while or not, if the demand to have to resurrected is there, then let it happen, means less threads, less confusion (for newcomers etc) and less threads dying out completely, it's all good y'all, IMHO of course. 

[Yonkey]

Yeah, thirty days might be a bit too small, now that I think about it.  I got that number because its the default warning setting right now.  I actually like the 6 months or older much better, since something that old is pretty outdated and more or less dead.

Remember that if you've been absent for a year, and a thread's been dead for 6 months (or longer), sure it may be new to you, but it's supah old to the rest of us!   When someone posts in them, not only do we forget what the original thread's about, but when the revival is with irrelevant info, the thread just get spammed with off-topic chat.  I'd be fine with that if they were all in the We're in Haven or Off-Topic, but a lot of the times they aren't.


On the other side of the coin, I do recognize that some post revivals are legit, and the intention isn't to scare newbies off.  I'd probably create an error message saying: "Sorry, this thread is no longer accepting replies, please create a new thread with a link to the old one."  If it's easy to automatically add the link to the post message, I may have it do that too.

Zelly also makes a good point that fan-fiction and fan-art could exceed the necro-limit, but again, they could easily create new threads.  In fact, I'd prefer it if they did a new thread per fan-art since it's usually pretty hard to sift through pages of a thread to find all the artwork.  As for fan-fics, I think we'll just manually merge them with the original threads.  Since they don't get created often, and they're obviously legit, they're easy to merge.

Haha and to Alex & Jesse, sure we could delete all irrelevant revivals, but when people go on a posting spree of 100+ posts at a time, it's annoying and a waste of time to clean them up, so often they get left untouched.

[Raforever]

is this topic dead?

although it helped me get to know what crazyness used to happen around here during OBs wild postings it usually gets people messed up so I'm against nacro-whateverItsCalled

but like Jesse said, there are cases with which it doesnt matter if its a year old 

[Storm]

Heheh, the poll reached a tide... at least now we know there are at least 6 spammoholics in our midst

[Rosella]

I change my vote.

7 spamaholics

[Oldbushie]

 

People don't like my thread revivals? I tried to make my posts relevant. I mean, come on, I wanted to catch up on old news.

At least fix New Posts so it shows all posts that haven't been read within the last 6 months. Currently it jsut shows all the new posts since the last time I was logged in and I miss out on stuff.

[Louisiana Night]

I think all the threads are still marked "new"... you just need to look a few pages into each section.

[Oldbushie]

Butbutbut... I'm lazy... 

[Gilgamesh]

I think it might be handy to remove some very old threads that nobody reads anymore or at least to remove the mark "new" of them.

[Rosella]

I'm still reading old threads! If you don't want the new symbol next to them, click view new posts and then click mark as read. That should do it.

[awesomeasapossum]

I go to old topics and respond to them when I'm bored... Not that they're boring........mmmm Dairy QUeen OReo Blizzard...mmmmtasty

[Yonkey]

Ok, since it's pretty much a tie, I'll allow necro-posting.  And just so that it doesn't scare newbies off, I've changed the old-topic warning from 30 days to 180.