I wanted to post something to an older thread and got a prompt asking if I wanted to revive this old conversation, and further telling me that everyone who had participated would be notified.
That last bit really gave me pause. I don’t want be the cause of sending out a mass email to everyone. Will it really notify everyone who posted in the thread? Or does it only notify people who subscribed to the thread?
It’s just like any other thread, really. If you have it set to Watching, you’ll get a notification that someone has posted a new reply. If you have it set to Normal, you’ll only get a notification if someone replied directly to you. If you have it set to Muted, then you won’t get a notification at all.
It’s not an email (though some have email notifications turned on), just a normal notification.
Sounds like it’s just discobot going on again: that’s not a Straight Dope rule at all, as far as I know, just one of those non-removable things baked into the software. discobot likes to give advice, which in my experience is almost always safely ignorable.
Yeah that’s a bit too strong of a warning; only people who have actively subscribed (are watching, at the highest notification level) the topic would be notified of a new reply.
I’ll see if I can edit the copy to tone that part down.
It really depends on local ordinances if replying to a 10+ year old topic is preferable to starting a new one. I tend to err on the side of the user – if you really feel this 10 year old topic is exactly the right fit for your reply, go for it!
I was in the mood to read something funny this morning, and so I went to find Scylla’s “when blimps attack!” thread from Feb ‘03, which absolutely did the trick. I was surprised, however, to find that it had been closed in April ‘05 after somebody bumped it. I guess rules for resurrecting zombie threads used to be pretty strict?
Anyway, for anyone unfamiliar with it:
Thank you for this…I needed a reason to laugh today…!
Truly a classic!
Not to speak for the mods, but the prohibition was always lighter in the Cafe Society. With this aggressive policing of thread drift (which I disagree with but isn’t the point), I’d almost expect harder prohibition on posting to old threads.
The details vary by forum, but you’ve always been allowed to bump threads to add something substantive and new to them. Some of this board’s greatest triumphs have been long-standing questions bumped a decade or more later with the answer.