No one could be as funny as you, Diane.
Someone resurrected one in GQ about critical masses and fission from 1999…sheesh, in those days our biggest worry was the Y2K problem, and when the dot-com bubble would burst.
The thing is, this is a Pit thread, and the ones resurrecting the old threads probably won’t come in the Pit. Which might not be a bad idea since we seem to already have an overload of “I just gotta post in the PIT to be somebody” posters who think they are really cute when in reality they come across as not too bright. Sigh Pitizens on Patrol.
That gave me the munchies…
Yeah, but you have to look at it from a newbie standpoint. I can’t tell you how many threads I open that are interesting to me and 3 posts down someone says, “Didn’t we already talk about this X months ago?” I’m almost afraid to start a post because I fear it’s already been done, and that seems almost like a crime around here! Why don’t they archive threads that are more than a month or two old?
P.S. Be nice, I’m new and ignorant. 
Chapped buttholes…heh heh heh…
Daniel
I think maybe there should be an automatic thread-locking mechanism - 2 months of inactivity or summat. Then again, vBulletin might not be able to do this.
I have mixed feelings about thread resurrection, on the one hand it does simplify things in the sense that you have the previous posts right there as a reference and it’s one less new thread taking up space, but on the other hand… Ah crap, why does thread resurrection suck so much aside from seeming really lame?
I’ve never been particularily bothered by thread resurrection. I can usually figure a thread’s been resurrected soon enough, and it’s actually kind of nice to read an old thread once again. Of course, some threads would have better been left to die.
Also, Seamonkey has a point. I imagine it’s rather frustrating to start a new thread and have some established poster tell you basically what boils down to “Foolish n00b!!! We discussed this here, here and here! And here! And we’ve talked about everything else you can imagine, so stop bothering us!”
It usually isn’t difficult to look on the first two pages to see if a topic is currently being discussed and then add your the cents. If you do a search and find an ancient thread that has fallen off the page months or even years ago and feel a burning need to add your own comment or ask a question, why resurrect the entire thing? Wouldn’t it be just as easy to prevent the deja vu to just say "A while back in this thread, someone posted . . . . Here are my thoughts on the subject . . . ".
The exception is a thread like NurseCarmen’s snowmobile thread where the OP came back to give an update. I see nothing wrong with that. It’s just all of the thread bumpings that are reopened with benign comments that is causing me to go freakin’ psycho.
Not too terribly long ago, one Mod or another (I can’t find the bloody thread, and I think this subject, thread resurrection, was a hijacking of the OP, anyway) suggested a “no post” period of six months.
Meaning, if the thread’s been inactive for six months or more, it’s preferred that you do just what Diane suggested, a new thread with a link to the old one.
[sub]I may have the time period wrong, but six months is sticking in my head for some reason.[/sub]
It would make sense if old threads were auto-locked.
In my experience most of the thread bumping I’ve seen (and the one or two I may have bumped) has been done accidentally, by someone following a link to that thread in a another thread, getting caught up reading it, and not noticing the date.
I know it should be really, really obvious to “check the date!” but I think as the majority of stuff we read here is the current threads, a lot of people probably get out of the habit of noticing the date, if they were ever in the habit.
I am all in favour of the suggestion in the OP, I just don’t think that people aren’t doing that, so much as bumping by accident.
I suppose it could be done by hand (they’d need to temporarily deputize some Junior Mods to handle all umpteen thousand existing threads stuff, of course), but does locking a thread, even without comment, automatically bump it? What a nightmare that would be.
Count me as one poster who opposes auto-locking of threads. The Ultimate Recipe Thread is a fine example of why. Such compendiums take a long time to assemble and scattering so much information throughout several threads would be more than inconvenient. I know that this represents an exception to most of the cases being cited but I feel it is important.
Other than that, I just wanted to say how NurseCarmen’s post cracked me right up.
The glut of resurrected threads in GQ today has inspired me into resurrecting this one. Today is like the day of the living dead threads:
Thread: Is it true that nothing is random?
Last Post Before Today: 03-05-2003
Resurrected by: cletus
Okay, five weeks and change. Hardly worth mentioning. How about ten months?:
Thread: Stuart Claimants to the UK throne
Last Post Before Today: 06-07-2002
Resurrected by: BrainGlutton
Or years?:
Thread: What causes that “Wet Dog” smell?
Last Post Before Today: 11-24-2001
Resurrected by: Jinx
Thread: Origins of current catchphrases
Last Post Before Today: 06-24-2001
Resurrected by: Jomo Mojo (OP)
Thread: Royal Pretenders
Last Post Before Today: 09-29-2000
Resurrected by: BrainGlutton
WTH?
According to the guidelines in ATMB:
Are the FAQs that easy to read? Okay, veterans know to go there and consult – or, as I just did, bring up a quoted passage to counter a statement. But are they user-friendly as far as new members are concerned?
And yes, resurrections are annoying. The occasional one due to error – hey, mistakes happen. But serial resurrections … shudder
If Jacques Barzun is right, you may want to use “déjà vu” instead of “deja vu” to indicate the original French meaning of “tedious familiarity” as opposed to the Americanized meaning of “illusory feeling that the current situation (moment) has been experienced before”. Alternatively, you could use déjà lu which means “the feeling that one has already read the present passage, or one very similar, before”.
Re: the point of this thread, is it okay if the thread in question is short?
Okay, I know a couple of reasons why newbies resurrect old threads.
A.) Someone has posted a link to an old thread in a new thread and the newbie finds something interesting in the old thread he/she would like to post a response to, which he/she then does, spontaneously before checking the date.
B.) Newbies have been bitched out so many times about “Why are you starting a NEW thread about this, SHEESH!!! Search the Archives, there are lots of OLD threads about this, add your comments to one of those!!”
Okay, so it was five months ago. That’s close to “not too terribly long ago,” isn’t it? Didn’t know it’d been added to the guidelines.
[sub]I could have sworn it was more recent than that. This whole “passage of time accelerating with age” thing sucks, I wanna tellya.[/sub]
CanvasShoes has two important points, there. A is generally an honest mistake, and it’s gonna happen from time to time.
B is fairly common, of late, or I’m just noticing it more often, recently. Couldn’t say how much of a factor it really is, though.
Ice Wolf said:
That’s the rub, right there. I lurked and read, on and off, for close to six months before I decided I had something to say, and had already read through the various FAQs and sticky threads because of the length of time involved.
A fair few newer posters either don’t feel the need to lurk that long, or (this is usually a GD phenomenon) the post they want to respond to pushes their “hot button” and they rush through registration and get right to posting, without the time for a little recon of the boards.
Other than the odd RTFM post, with appropriate links for their benefit, waddawe gonna do?
(It crossed my mind to wonder about adding a three or four question form to the registration process, about relevant aspects of the SDMB, but somehow, I’m seeing “Excedrin Headache #73” writ large all over this.)
Okay, this one is getting a little weird:
Thread: RIAA vs. KaZaa w/ Proxy
Last Post Before Resurrection: 01-23-2003
Resurrected by: cletus
Thread: Can fans save a cancelled TV show?
Last Post Before Resurrection: 02-07-2003
Resurrected by: cletus
Thread: Debt collectors
Last Post Before Resurrection: 03-04-2003
Resurrected by: cletus
Thread: Peeing after sex
Last Post Before Resurrection: 03-04-2003
Resurrected by: cletus
Thread: Are black kids burning CD’s?
Last Post Before Resurrection: 03-05-2003
Resurrected by: cletus
Thread: Is it true that nothing is random?
Last Post Before Resurrection: 03-05-2003
Resurrected by: cletus
Thread: removing uninstalled programmes in XP
Last Post Before Resurrection: 03-05-2003
Resurrected by: cletus
Thread: What do senators talk about during a filibuster?
Last Post Before Resurrection: 03-06-2003
Resurrected by: cletus
Thread: Wow, too much bandwidth! What to do?
Last Post Before Resurrection: 03-13-2003
Resurrected by: cletus
Thread: Cover songs that are better than the originals
Last Post Before Resurrection: 03-21-2003
Resurrected by: cletus
All these resurrected threads were less than six months old, so no big deal. But cletus just joined last week, his post count is 20, and practically half those posts are threads resurrected from a month or more before he joined. Nearly a third of his posts are resurrecting threads from the same three-day window in March.