Replying to years old threads. Pros and cons

Definitely not relevant to a topic where the last post was 7 years ago…

Is there a posability to close all older posts at a definded age automatically, so they are only available to inform and not to continue?

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Sometimes continuing an old topic makes sense, and helps keeps things organised. Fewer threads on the same topic might make for easier searching, for example.

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Honestly this seems to be more a problem of the engine to search topics that it is too easy to find ancient things to reply to

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But we want people to find even old stuff that seems relevant to their search. What we need is a big fat notice when someone wants to reply to a years old thread. “Are you sure you want to reply to this x year old topic? Resurrecting mummified threads is frowned upon, generally…”

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i feel like people should post their updates to even super old threads. people search at any time and so many seemingly viable avenues end up dead ends. finding the one helpful comment is like rain in the desert. i’ve had it happen with haiku, and in my professional life – someone posting about a famed but poorly documented lighting system in a thread elsewhere, years after the conversation had ended, made all the difference in the world in preparation for an important event shoot.

the only downside to people adding helpful information to old threads is the comments that follow about how no one should post to old threads (which is at odds with many forum policies of searching first before starting new threads)

it depends on how the post is. if you ask questions about an old entry that may have been edited for a long time and is negative because it appears again at the top, it is a problem because it does not represent the truth.

if you really want to start something new in relation to an old entry, the discussion here is needed again, then you can put a link to the old post in the new post and refer to it.

I think it would be a more sensible way. therefore, old posts that have not been updated for a long time can be blocked (read yes, write no).

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those links aren’t what come up in searches. threads are. we have a policy here of searching for topics before starting new threads. this is at odds with not replying to old threads. taken together it just leads to less discussion.

in this soecific case the only irrelevant junk added to this thread long after the fact has been complaints and discussion around replying to old threads. if nobody did that and everyone just left these old threads alone until they had something relevant to contribute to the new information, there would be no problem.

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This is a discussion originally about Intel graphics and 3D acceleration. The reply is about AMD graphics cards and does not mention 3D acceleration.

I don’t mind resuming an old topic to add similar/related information, but in this case, it’s not even related, so I don’t see the point.

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there’s especially not a point in talking about how pointless it is.

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It makes sense to use the forum’s search first and add any relevant information to old posts. I don’t mind if you ask if there is a solution to the old problem.

If there is a solution, you could close the thread.

The problem, as I see it, of re-animating years old threads is that they pop up and people that weren’t around to have read it when it came the first time round, will start at the first post of that thread. One often doesn’t realize that this is from say 2007 and is misled by often outdated info.

I can imagine that people use the forum search (good!) to see if some topic has come up before. Then they reply to something that is only vaguely related to their issue, instead of creating a new post.

If you think some very old thread is still relevant to what you have to add, why not start your new thread with:

I found this old thread [LINK] that got me thinking…

And then elaborate. People interested in the history can read up on it.

I wonder if we moderators should do just that where possible.

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links break. the splitting of this topic is a perfect example.

Top post link should never break.

top post is often not the post of interest when conversations get picked up again.

Then people should quote the post of interest. It’s not like we’ll start splitting years old threads which would break links.

I personally hate forums which program 30 days “old” topics to auto close, and even hate more when moderators close topics manually on other forums, after someone posted something which is perfectly relevant on a 5 years old topic. Some issues or questions can be still relevant after several years, but some moderators just close them because it’s old (and sometime without reading or understanding how relevant it was)

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none of us has any way of knowing what mods will do. all of us have experience with threads all over the internet with seemingly important information lost forever because of broken links.

Haiku in and of itself is an old topic and a cutting edge topic. We should try to find a way to capture the depth of our search history and knowledge without unnecessarily resuscitating old threads.

I don’t understand why there is so much debate here. Old thieads remain open and sometimes it’s the right thing to do an update. Just like some tickets in the bug tracker are sometimes inactive for 10 years and then someone searts working on it.

My initial comment which started this was on using an old thread to post unrelated content. In other words, the problem is not that the thread was old, just that the new message was unrelated to the previous ones.

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