Posting to not-so-old topics

General Discussions
#1

I have a request for @Riven: could we please relax the rule for not posting to old topics? I’m referring to the:

[quote]You cannot reply to this message, because it is very, very old.
[/quote]
lock that is applied to topics that haven’t had a reply recently.

As an example, I wanted to contribute useful information to two topics today and both were locked. The first with a last reply on 27 Oct 2016 and the second on 17 Jan 2017. I don’t think either topic is that old or long forgotten. Adding my reply to the existing topics is preferable to creating a new topic that references the old. Especially if the reply is a minor contribution to the discussion.

I’m not sure what the current time limit is, but can we maybe increase it to at least a year?

#2

I concur. I’ve never seen the problem with posting to old topics, why should they be locked?

#3

Anti-necroposting rules always seemed weird and arbitrary to me, because isn’t it better to just contribute to an existing thread so that old topics and discussions aren’t retreaded by making a new thread? Then again I’ve never really extensively managed a forum.

#4

And can you plz return this project to my profile Projects :wink:

#5

Considering how long many topics can stay relevant, I agree.

#6

[quote]Anti-necroposting rules always seemed weird and arbitrary to me, because […]
[/quote]
You can look at it from the other side too… One day this limitation was introduced as a solution to a problem.
Since then, obviously, the problem disappeared, and people are saying ‘why do we have these weird and arbitrary rules?’.

There’s always a balance between freedom and restrictions, to nudge people into not misbehaving.
That balance can be altered, when deemed beneficial, so I’ll increase the time period to 365 days.

#7

what about leap years

#8

Leap-seconds are next.

#9

You can look at it from the other side too… One day this limitation was introduced as a solution to a problem.
[/quote]
That makes sense. I’ve never have messed with this stuff, so from an outside perspective I just didn’t get it. Out of curiosity, what kind of problem/limitations lead to necroposting being banned?

#10

New community members who wanted to get their post count up would post random unintelligent comments such as ‘i agree’ in the hope of attaining a higher status under their username.
Riven also attempted to fix this by amending the way the status is calculated.

#11

What CommanderKeith said - but in a broader sense: the signal-to-noise ratio was very low, for necro-posts, after which a barrage of posts followed by regulars, raising concerns about whether ‘this post was worth the necro?’, with people not realising they were now part of the problem. Given that everybody+dog uses the [unread posts since epoch] link in the header, it would regularly point to a lot of noise.

Now if only SMF wasn’t written so poorly, I could tweak it that regular members (or original posters) could post in older threads, but that would be quite a hassle, so I piggybacked on the thread-block functionality. Indeed, this isn’t ideal - but it’s at the very least a minor improvement of JGO. If you want your thread unlocked, kindly ask - so far I granted all requests.

#12

I just realized in my five years of being a JGO member I have never once clicked that link until you mentioned it. Always just scrolled down to the feed at the bottom. Not feeling particularly intelligent today.