Just wondering; if resurrecting an old, stale thread is such a bad thing, why aren’t threads locked after a certain, arbitrary length of inactivity, a month, two months, a year…? Is it just so somebody can jump into the thread and make a useless, irrelevant post about the thread being old?
This has been discussed many times in ATMB. FWIW, I agree with you but I also get why they’re left open…
Moderator Action
Moving thread from General Questions to About This Message Board.
It’s not, at least not always. Frequently, zombies are resurrected with new information that settles an old question; case in point. A blanket ban would perpetuate ignorance. Better to do it on a case by case basis.
Some are closed, some aren’t. There doesn’t have to be a line in the sand.
No offense to the OP, being new and all, but does anyone know if this is the most often asked question in ATMB? Or maybe the one about why we can’t edit after 5 minutes? Something else?
How about, “I want to cancel my account and delete all my posts.”
There’s also how do/when will/why don’t we get avatars.
If it weren’t for the board-threatening scourge of old, often interesting threads popping up because someone found them on google, we’d hardly have anything to talk about.
Or, “Help! I can’t figure out how to embed an image in my post.”
Some forums ban you for resurrecting old thread as I found out by accident once. I’m more curious as to what the universal standard is on how many days or weeks is considered too old for resurrection.
What I personally think sucks about any particular forum is if I Google (well I use duckduckgo) for something and a relevant topic shows up but I need more specific info but can’t just because it was say 2yrs old or whatever which then forces me to make a new topic about the same darn thing and then I get responses that say…here I googled it for you or This thread has already been done…gee thanks.
Worse beyond that is that some forums I visit have THE absolute worst search engine for itself ever. Then again, why waste time sorting through search results which can take hours at times, when you can sucker some conceited shmoe who likes to feel smart into doing it for you.
It would make more sense to have a policy requiring an existing thread to be the only place for more on the exact same subject; mods would join the threads if the new poster didn’t find the old one.
The problem with that is, depending on the subject matter, new members expect responses from others who posted years ago, and sometimes aren’t active or even alive anymore.
The general policy is, if there isn’t an active thread, start a new one and link to the old one.
The reason we don’t shoot all zombies in the head as that we’re on a limited budget here and the price of ammo has really gone up lately.
On a more serious note, we used to not allow zombies, and people complained. So we allowed zombies, and people complain. We can’t win.
A lot of times, threads are revived by a drive-by newbie who finds the post from google, doesn’t realize that the thread is 14 years old, makes a barely relevant comment, and is never seen again. A lot of people get very annoyed at these.
Other times, threads are revived by someone adding new information and it results in the discussion picking back up again. If we close these, people get mad because a perfectly good and interesting conversation was shut down.
I personally have backed away from a strict enforcement of the zombie rule in GQ. Even if the thread was revived by a drive-by, I’ll wait a little bit to see if the thread generates any new and interesting conversations. If all it gets are zombie jokes and post reports, then I’ll close it. If the thread manages to take back off and become interesting on its own, then I let it go.
There is one forum unrelated to here I sometimes go on, and every so often, we get threads resurrected from years 2000/2001. It always seems to be done by members who have just joined the day the post was made that bumped the thread, then, a few hours later, the mods ban that user.
If memory serves (which it occasionally does), in a recently revived thread it was posited that the revival was thanks to a since-banned spammer. Or perhaps that was stated outright by a moderator, I’m not sure which. The service my memory provides is spotty at best. Whenever I find a resurrected thread here with no discernible cause for its return, I figure it’s a lousy spammer to blame.
Personally I have no issue with zombified threads, sometimes the zombie jokes are even amusing. Actual zombies, on the other hand, are cause for alarm and should be avoided at all costs.
Bigot.
What is the third ‘-gry’ word?
Because (if it were up to me, which it isn’t), an automatic close would remove the human judgement factor. Some threads should undoubtedly be shut down after 2 minutes; others benefit from additions years later.
You can talk about your smart silicon all you want, but so far, no computer program has been able to substitute adequately for a human in this judgement call. Hence mods.
Although I have my doubts about some mods.
And before someone asks: “Well, how about an automatic feature that creates a Warning: this thread is over X years old, do you still wish to answer y/n dialog when someone tries to answer”; that has also been discussed before. Apparently the system just plain does not provide for such function. And it still could potentially dissuade people with a legit useful follow-up.
Hey, don’t get me wrong. Some of my best friends are re-animated corpses.