This thread just popped up about 21 threads from the top of MPSIMS, even though nobody has posted in it since 2000.
Almost certainly a spam resurrection. The spammer got banned and his “contribution” cornfielded but there’s no way to return the unrestful dead to its grave.
Probably a spammer that got cornfielded.
Confirmed. Spammer that got nuked. One of the delightful “features” of Discourse is that when a spammer bumps a thread and gets nuked, the thread stays bumped. I’m sure that @codinghorror would tell us that there’s some reason why a good message board absolutely must behave in that way.
Isn’t that exactly how it worked with vBulletin?
+1
But according to self-appointed sages virtually everything is awful with Discourse, even when it performs identically to vBulletin.
There was plenty awful with vBulletin, too.
I’m pretty sure vBulletin sorts threads by the date of the most recent non-deleted post. But there were two ways of deleting posts, they could be truly deleted or just hidden from non-mods, and it’s possible that the SDMB mods did the latter. I don’t know, i wasn’t a mod here in the vBulletin days.
am I detecting some heat with the dear creator?
There has always been some friction. CH has been pretty active on the board and responsive to suggestions and complaints, and has been good about implementing fixes and changes at times. At other times, he has insisted on some behaviors that seem completely unhelpful because it fits with the way he (and presumably others he works with) believe a message board should work. “Nanny” actions like automatically removing markers to show who you are responding to, or removing a quote from your reply. Or the ridiculous way that dates are formatted, so that a post made on January 11th of this year is dated “Jan 11” and a post made in the month of January in the year 2011 says “Jan '11”. And there is no option to change any of that.
So yes, I’m sure there is a lot the people are grateful for, and a lot that cause people to curse at the new software. Like most things in life, there is good and bad all mixed up.
You are correct.
In vBulletin, if a post was hidden or removed, the thread sank back down to where it came from regardless of how we made it disappear. If you saw a thread that had been bumped by a spammer, either we hadn’t deleted the spammer yet, or alternately someone else responded to the thread after the spam so that when we did send the spammer to the cornfield there was still at least one new post in the thread.
I am actually grateful that we have @codinghorror and his devs actively working on Discourse. There were a lot of annoyances and some things that were completely broken in vBulletin that we knew would never get fixed since no one was working on it (and we tried updating to a later version, that failed miserably). For example, vBulletin’s search could fail for no reason at all. Sometimes certain key words would cause the search to grind to a halt. Sometimes those exact same key words in a different order worked fine. vBulletin would often lose track of what posts you actually read and did not read, so the new posts feature was often completely borked. Some people would get logged out for no reason whatsoever. There were all kinds of weird bugs like that which we just had to deal with because they would never be fixed.
Discourse is actively maintained, so bugs get fixed. It’s much better in that respect. Sometimes new features or bug fixes end up causing problems, but that’s the way software goes. You take the good with the bad.
That said, I also share the frustration of many here that there are some things that @codinghorror simply refuses to fix for reasons that (to me, at least) don’t make much sense.
The handling of bumped threads and subsequent deletions was handled better by vBulletin, as was the handling of dates. Unfortunately I don’t think that we are going to get either one fixed any time soon.
That’s how I remembered it; that old threads bumped by spammers no longer remained on the first page.