A lot of zombie threads have been popping up recently thanks to the revised zombie rules.
I’m not against them, but it is a bit annoying to realize at the end of a thread that it’s years old.
Could they be marked somehow, perhaps with a small icon or a grey link color or something of the sort?
Thread from a couple weeks ago that discusses this topic (it was easy to miss due to the subject line):
Cool.
I was thinking more along the lines of automatic notifications, not demanding moderator time.
Maybe something like prepending the thread title with [Old Thread] if the latest reply is more than a month after the last post? It should be a pretty simple code change to the reply function.
I could have sworn they were already marked in the top left corner of every post.
What?
I think srzss05 is talking about the time/date stamp on each post. It’s a marking.
Yes, it’s there. No, not every reads it. Yes, some people do. Yes, it’s funny/annoying when you read an old post and realize you wrote it.
(Just anticipating the upcoming messages…)
-D/a
I once suggested a distinctive font or background color. That would make it possible to read old posts while being immediately aware that they were old.
While a good idea, I don’t believe there is any automatic way to do so, so it isn’t a practical solution.
@the post above yours—Bingo.
It would be a simple script on the server side. “If post date > 1 month from current date, give it CSS class .old-post-background”
Yeah, you could code it in HTML5 but with all the spotty browser coverage out there (I am looking at you, Firefox), doing with a server side script would be more universal and would be about three lines of code in C#.
All kidding aside, would it possible to grant limited modding/admin privileges to a select group of volunteer Dopers which would allow them to add a note to the OP indicating it’s a reanimated zombie or, add “[zombie thread]” to the title?
There’s a post there indicating that a different vBulletin site has a checkbox before posting to old threads - I’d really appreciate that. Sometimes when very old threads are linked, I’ll read through it without noticing how old it is, and then later come very close to (if not going through with) posting a reply. Embarassing.
I agree that would be very helpful… maybe colour the background of old posts differently so that you can see when they advance to recent history?
(Maybe I should also add that as a general rule I’m not against zombie threads, but it’s annoying when newcomers find something on Google and make it their first post, which means you get the excellent historical posts mixed in with the “Zombie thread!” posts, the “Welcome to” posts, and the “Don’t bump old threads” posts.)
Sometimes there’s more than a month between episodes of a TV show, so if there’s a “season” thread instead of individual “episodes” threads, you’ve just made an active thread that’s just on a break a zombie. Ditto for threads about movies once they’ve died down post-theatrical run, but are now coming to DVD/Bluray.
IMO, if people are so perturbed by zombies, those people should just get in the habit of looking at dates more often. If they can’t bother, too bad for them, they just wasted a few minutes on an old thread. The horror!
Then just make it, say, 3 months in Cafe Society and 1 month everywhere else. The exact numbers aren’t important.
I think you’re blowing both the impact and the solution out of proportion. It’s a small fix to a small problem that would likely do a few of us some good and not really harm anyone.
ETA: The annoyance is in reading through a multi-page thread, loving the conservation, and then just when I’m about to reply, realizing that it’s from four years ago and most of the posters who started that awesome conversation are probably either not around anymore or wouldn’t care about that particular thread. Empty hopes and all that.
So learn to look at dates when you open a thread if it causes so much angst for you. Why is that so hard? I can’t believe that people around here pay so much attention to titles and join dates and poster names, but looking at a post date is something they can’t comprehend.
It’s hard because I’m not in the habit, because most threads aren’t zombies, because you can’t tell if a thread is a zombie until after you go into it, and because I have poor vision so the tiny grey text against a grey background is not easy to read. I don’t usually pay much attention to titles or any of the other stuff either, just the contents of a post and maybe the name.
As far as I can tell, this would be a usability improvement that:
Why not?
I don’t think this is such an unreasonable accessibility request.
if you don’t look at time/date stamps there are two good methods to spot zombies.
when you read the OP and think of a reply then as you scroll down, you see you had the same thought before.
as you scroll down you see replies from people now BANNED or people you know to be no longer among the living.
I came in post this as well- look for the BANNED title under the user names. Best clue it’s a zombie.
Perhaps you should get into the habit if it bothers you so much.
If you can notice the name, you can notice the post date. If your vision is that poor, change the font in your browser. I have mine setup to show all fonts the same size (because I use a laptop several feet away from me with a wireless mouse—this also has the added benefit of not having to see posts when someone does something stupid like posting in size 72 font).
If you are having a problem, you can solve it. No, it does no harm to someone that doesn’t have the problem, but this subject comes up at least once a month, and from what I can determine “fixing” it isn’t worth the bother.
If it comes up at least once a month, I would say that’s evidence that it IS worth it, if any of the staff can spare the time to code the changes (or let one of us do it).
I’ve already made a lot of usability changes to the SDMB, so this isn’t a matter of laziness, but of technical limitations of the tools I’m working with. This is the sort of thing that makes the most sense as a server-side script.
I don’t understand the opposition. This would be really helpful for some of us and won’t affect the rest of you negatively. Why do you care?
If I had a way of doing this on the client end without hurting the rest of the SDMB experience (which normalizing all font sizes would do, arguably), I would. Maybe I’ll look into a Greasemonkey script…