The last week or so, it seems that half the threads I click on for the first time are more than 2 years old, with some more than 10 years old, and they’ve been revived, not by someone posting an update, but by a new user, who is probably googling topics and finding them.
I know this happens; it just seems to be happening a LOT recently. Did the Straight Dope get a mention somewhere, driving a lot on new traffic here?
I know that we also sometimes get a spate of zombies all revived by one new poster, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. There was one person who revived like, three, but I must have clicked on 15 zombies in the last 7 days. That’s a lot considering that I’ve gone months with none before.
Or is it just one of those “rule of large numbers” things?
I do know that a large percentage of the time I google for information on pretty much topic, a Straight Dope link is high on the first page of results–we have a very high Google search ranking for some reason. (It is how I ended up here a year ago–looking back, I realize that there have been multiple instances over the years where I stumbled across a thread here while researching a subject, but it was only last year that I bothered to browse around on other threads here, too, and fall into the time sink.) So some of those posters likely found this place the same way. Others, I suspect, are part of an organized effort to troll here by the members of some site, somewhere, who are getting giggles from it. I’ve done a bit of googling attempting to find it, but with no luck.
I mentally think of the zombie posts as analogous to bioturbation, screwing up the site’s strata.
I was going to say “October” but its basically the same thought. In my brain something says October and April could be the larger months for old threads to be resurrected but I don’t have any hard evidence of it or any idea if one could chart such things back over the years. That is just how my brain is remembering things at the moment.
Maybe cuz the board is mobile-friendly now, so people who come across it on their phone can easily read and reply instead of having to do whatever one used to have to do to get it working on mobile (stretch and scroll, I presume)