Every couple of weeks, it seems, some topic will pop up when I hit “New Posts,” that will turn out to be a revived thread (sometimes so old, no one on it even posts anymore) with one new post at the end, and the join date will be this month and year. Do people really come here, comb through old threads, and get so riled up by whether or not jury duty letters should be certified, that they MUST open an account NOW, to post an opinion, one which the OP will probably never see?
What motivates that? Is it people following tangents from mailbag posts or something? Do they not look at the dates?
The message boards content shows up on Google searches. They search the topic they are interested in and get a link to one of our threads. Upon reading a post or thread they decide they’d like to reply, so make an account to do so.
It’s an ingenious trap to catch people incapable of reading dates.
I wonder if board software policies can be implemented to lock threads > say, 3 years old. Read them if you want but if you simply MUST respond, open your own new one on the subject.
One reason you find old threads posted to is due to spammers. Sometimes the spam is quickly caught, the post & poster deleted, but the thread still shows as having new posts by the time you see it.
I don’t think this is such a good idea. There have been times where an old thread would have been the best place to put something new about the topic, and starting a new thread would break the link.
I’m not against a warning message about the zombie condition, but unless vB implements such a user feature, it would take a hack of the system, something not considered Kosher around here.
You linked to a google search result, which mixes up quotes and removes the attribution, often making it appear that one poster said something that they didn’t, but only quoted. Very misleading.
Here is the true link to the same 2005 thread, but without the misquotes:
And no, I haven’t changed my opinion about this in 11 years.
Just to address a couple of reports I’ve seen thus far, my reading of the question in the OP here is asking about the motivation of random people on the internet, not about moderator action in zombie threads. Hence, I think this thread is in the appropriate forum for the time being.
I’ve always thought this board should include a style that makes the post date turn redder and bolder the older it is, so you could visually infer a post’s age while just scanning. It wouldn’t be very difficult to do. (I was a vB developer for a few years.)
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