Whilst reading a thread, I followed a link to another thread that was rather interesting but there was one post I thought merited comment. Then I glanced up at that little grey bar and noticed that the thread was seven years old. Lucky that, I would have looked darn stupid.
My question is, how easy is it to alter the vBulletin that runs this board? I was thinking, maybe just a snippet that looks at the year on a post and hilites it in bold red or something, to gently nudge people away from dragging up necrotic zombies?
Why does there need to be? You have eyes. Glance at the dates every now and then. I’ve never posted to a zombie thread without knowing it was a zombie beforehand.
Several different remedies have been suggested. I’m in favor of some form of archival system that would automatically put all threads after a certain time in “read only” status but that would not be an easy thing to implement, especially at this somewhat late stage in the game, what with our many years of postings. And I’m not the one who decides, neither.
So we just bump along as we have.
It is the easiest thing all the way around to ask people to read for comprehension, being conscious of the timestamps. We’ve all failed read the date properly (or at all) at some point and will no doubt do it again.
In addition to the userscript by Polerius already mentioned, here is a simple script that just makes the date stamp on posts more readable. The gray font against a gray background is difficult to read for many. If you use Chrome or Firefox with the Greasemonkey add-on, SDMB Bold Dates will make the date stamp darker and much more readable (IMHO) right out of the box. If you want to customize it further it can be changed to any font, size, color and style that you like.
I’m still a (relative) newbie here. What I tend to do is only post in threads which appear on the first page of a forum section. This prevents me from being the one to resurrect a thread, though it doesn’t prevent me from finding zombie threads resurrected, mistakenly or not, by others.
From recent threads on this, the best remedies I’ve seen suggested (IMHO) look like they should be easy, if they are possible at all with vBulletin:
The date at the top of each individual post should be shown in some bold font, or at least if it’s is older than a certain date. Or in come stand-out color. Possible?
One the thread list page, the date of the OP should be displayed. According to earlier discussion, there is plenty of room for it there, just beneath each thread title (along with the OP’s name), and current versions of vBulletin allow this. But it wasn’t resolved whether the SDMB version of
vBulletin allows this. Again, isn’t this a rather trivial thing to implement, if it’s possible at all?
No scheme will stop ALL zombies, but these two ideas ought to catch quite a lot of them, I would think.