I ask because this is the only board I’ve ever heard of that has a ban on zombie threads-- in fact, most other boards I go to encourage them. I’ve seen people start threads at other boards and a mod comes along and links to an older thread and closes the new one.
I can understand certain social community reasons for not resurrecting old threads-- it was a big fight, the OP is banned, etc etc (and I agree with those reasons; that’s a good rule)-- but the tech excuse baffles me. I hate it because often I’ll see an old tv show or movie and search the archives for it, and want to comment on some of those old discussions but can’t.
First, the question probably belongs in About This Message Board.
Second, where have you read the explanation about taxing servers? I have never actually seen an explanation for it on these boards and figured it was for practical reasons, such as old threads being revived with no substantive new information to add, original OP possibly not engaged any longer, etc.
Third, I do not know the details of this board is implemented, but if it’s straightforward, then each post is recorded as a database record. Replying to an old thread shouldn’t be any more expensive in terms of system resources than replying to one started today. Everything should be indexed to optimize replying to a thread because that is the most common transaction. If so, it doesn’t matter a whit how old the thread it. But I emphasize that I don’t know the actual implementation.
I guess a zombie thread is a long thread and longer threads will take longer as the database lookup will be pulling more records, but I’m not certain if there’s a big performance hit there. Especially if the results are retrieved one page at a time. If every user is loading a page with 3k comments, then yes, you probably will have an issue compared to just loading 30 comments.
For the most part, I think the reasons for this are social.
Yes, it is really just a style and social thing here. Really long threads get annoying unless the activity happens quickly and that is one way to discourage that. A few threads make it into the 1000+ post range and they become unworkable. In my search results, I see that I posted something on in a World of Warcraft general discussion thread once but I have no idea what that was because I don’t play it and I don’t want to manually search through all the pages to find it either. I work databases thousands of times bigger than this one for a living. It isn’t a computing horsepower issue. Most likely, any single semi-modern computer could run this board if you wanted it too and it was set up correctly. The computing requirements for text retrieval are very low for both hardware and software standards.
That isn’t to say such a thing is impossible. Sometimes older records get moved into archive files on some systems that are harder to search or not available at all but the entire SDMB since inception could easily fit on the flash drive I keep on my keyring. It is only several gigabytes of typed text plus the associated database files.
It used to be a bigger problem than now. Back when I maintained servers for databases in hotels, computers were weak and if you didn’t have a properly organized database it was trouble. At my hotel it would take about and hour to run a Crystal Report. When I reorganized the data after much data mining and updated our server I got the report to run in 3 minutes. Three minutes versus sixty is a big deal
When people search it does tax the server. This was much more of an issue when computers weren’t powerful. If you encourage people to always look for a thread before posting, so duplicates won’t be posted, what you’re really doing is saying “Search first.”
OK so now you’ve just added stress to the server. For example if 10 people start theads that’s one thing, if 10 people search first THEN start a thread it stresses the database, imagine multiplying this by hundreds.
So if people are reasonably certain if a thread topic does exist it’ll be old they won’t search.
Of course now that Google can search and index the site, that helps as you can use Google and their servers to search.
Also in my day poorly written code often left searches in endless loops and that wasn’t a good thing.
I think these things, as I said, are less of a problem today, but still every little bit adds up, especially on a well trafficked site
They are. The mods have very definitively stated that the reason zombie threads are closed is because people don’t always look at post dates. They see a thread on the first page and assume it’s current, and will frequently respond to a years-old post as though it were posted just yesterday, when said poster might not even be around any more. It can also reopen old wounds when dramatic threads are bumped. It’s just disruptive more often than not.
As far as I’m aware, server stress has nothing to do with the policy.