In this thread, Bites When Provokes asks for upbeat songs. Without ever listening to the lyrics, I recommended Handlebars by Flobots. It sounded upbeat to me. It turns out that the song ends in nuclear holocaust. I’d like to go back in and correct my post, but no one has added to it in over 2 months. So it seems like it’s not worth fixing. But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t viewing the thread. I wouldn’t want to continue to mislead them.
This thread ended up getting locked because I added to it 3 years later. But my addition was relevant to the thread. The moderator suggested I start a new thread?
Your first example is in CS, and it is under the suggested guideline for time limits, so that would probably be permissible. Personally, I’m not sure it is worth reviving it just to correct a post of the kind you mention, especially since a large number of songs were mentioned and yours was just one of them.
The second example, as a three-year-old thread in IMHO, should definitely have been linked to rather than revived.
If I want to add a substantive comment to a CS thread, or to a thread in one of the other three forums singled out in the guidelines, it is acceptable to do so even if the thread is older than three months.
I do not think I have ever seen an old thread closure denoted by something like “Post not substantive - thread closed”. The message is normally along the lines of “Zombie thread - aims shotgun”. When a moderator sees, or is apprised of, the re-emergence of a thread older than three months, is it the practice to make a judgement call regarding the substance value of the resurrecting post, or is the thread closed regardless?
Perhaps someone could point me in the direction of an old thread, in GQ or CS, which was revived by a substantive comment and allowed to live happily ever after.
Why revive an old thread when starting a new one works just as well? If you want to correct something specific you said in that thread, provide a link to that post – but in general, I don’t want to read a conversation that happened six months or a year ago. By linking to the previous, you allow those who do want to read through an old conversation the option to do so, but you’re not excluding those who are around now who didn’t participate. (“Oh, geez, I can’t say X – PosterQ, who I’ve never heard of and doesn’t seem to be around anyway, made pretty much the same point two and a half years ago.”)
It’s also fairly common in Cafe Society. I think I’ve only closed one thread there for being resurrected by a non-substantive post; otherwise, we let the threads live even if roused after a year or two’s slumber. Typically, though, revived threads in CS have something interesting added to them and there’s no need to close them.
In MPSIMS, however, while we do consider the reviving post, we typically close the zombie threads right away. It’s pretty rare that we let a zombie thread live, and when we do it’s usually because it’s just over the zombie date, or some other reason which doesn’t pop up all that often.