I’m not a staff member on Serenes, so I can’t give you a hard figure. If I had to guess, certain subforums of SF (3DS/3H/heroes discussion) are more active, but not meaningfully so compared to us.
Honestly having everyone on this forum go through this change because the action of one person nerco posting on a one year+ old topic feels wrong. I meant you can just delete his/her post then give him/her a warning not to do it again. If they do it again intentionally just punish them for it.
And one more thing, before the said person I mentioned, what was the last time someone nerco posted?
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People keep saying this, but if you look closely, you might notice that this policy literally would not even catch that case.
If anything, it did remind me that this is a policy that I have been meaning to implement for a while.
Well, fantastic for those communities. We don’t have that much activity, it honestly goes really slowly. Part of why I like to read old threads is because what’s apparently new is usually just the same old stuff.
The reason the forum doesn’t feel like it needs it is because it feels fine. I don’t know how much stress you go through getting rid of however many necroposts; necroposters tend to be same old trolls or uninformed individuals. Preventative measures are not the way that I think it should be handled, but rather curative. We should be punishing add-nothings anyhow, no? People are going to add dumb stuff regardless of the age of the post.
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At this point, we’re going back and forth with “it feels fine” and “it doesn’t feel fine” and I suspect that nothing that’s said will convince anyone of the alternative. Without naming names, there are a few people I’ve been talking with in this thread that I was specifically thinking of when I decided to pull the trigger on this policy. I’ve also mostly said my piece on the “just punish the say-nothing bumps”, which is that we already do that.
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I’m gonna jump on this just to echo my agreement that this is a bit out of left field, not to mention this code or w/e it is that seems to not function entirely as specified in OP.
This thread closes in “a day” even though the most recent post is… uh… an hour ago, as of writing this. So the locking seems to occur after OP, not inactivity. Plus it’s a “design” thread which, according to the OP here, shouldn’t even lock until 30 days from now, much less in a single one. Not to mention the question of “what happens when a category is changed?” that Snek raised above.
I’m gonna echo Vilk’s point that “bump” and “necro” haven’t appeared in the official forum rules or TOS anywhere. I’ve checked numerous times when I’VE gotten annoyed with random necros. But that brings up a point… Nine times out of ten, what harm is done by a necro aside from being annoying and sometimes making someone look like an idiot? Clutters up the forum? Maybe we should use something that has actual organization on the homescreen beyond “most recent post,” though I know the intention with FEU from the start was the equal viewership for everything to begin with.
This isn’t even going to MENTION the fact that this just kinda… happened. I’m choosing to trust that it was discussed internally by at least a FEW moderators. I don’t mean to go so far as to say the entire community should have a say, though. While we’re hardly large enough to warrant some things, we’re hardly small enough that every voice should be taken into account. Either way, the vision for how a community should look in terms of relatively harmless things like this should be an idea of the community largely as a whole. A simple poll could have read popularity on this. The fact that numerous people who have historically disagreed with each other on most things are agreeing that this takes it a bit far. Necros on toxic threads are more an issue with the thread, not the necro.
In summary: Is this to actually improve the community (both the face and the experience), or to make things less annoying for certain individuals particularly irked by necros? Trust me, I don’t like pointless necros. They annoy tf out of me. But I hardly think a minor annoyance warrants forcing people to DM mods to open threads and deal with random thread locks, particularly when numerous mods are largely inactive or don’t really seem to focus on the moderation side of their job.
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If we’re so divisive, we can try a community vote and call it a day. I don’t think anything too terrible will happen one way or the other. It’s just a minor inconvenience at worst, as far as I can tell.
Yes that could work.
this is because the software is stupid and doesn’t retroactively change thread timers when I told it to be 30 days instead of 2 days
primarily this, along with the mod time needed to delete them (as I’ve said several times now: there’s more than you see)
I think this is an entirely different issue. Are there particular mods you think display this problem?
If this was how we settled things, we would never have left SF in the first place. I’ve already been swayed on many things from the conversations in this thread and on the discord, it’s just that “we don’t need this policy” and “this policy is a bad idea” aren’t among them.
Serenes Forest is already extremely strict because of its necroposting rule, sometimes feeling barren for it. I get it, though. This isn’t a democracy, this is simply a place kept order by the all-powerful moderators. That’s the system, and I respect it. I don’t always have to like it, but I respect it.
The thing is, as far as I can tell, if there’s something to back up the “we don’t need this policy” claim, or the “this policy is a bad idea” statement, that should be the important material. I don’t think I quite like just sitting down and being expected to go along with the idea or giving feedback on the extent of the idea. If I think an idea is bad, I’m not going to support it via spirit, but I have the wisdom to not cause a big fuss, as well as to try to balance pros and cons of the said change.
I like these forums because of the freedom. If it feels restrictive, it’s not a great place. I don’t want to have to worry that my topics are going to get locked because nobody responded to it and have to take the time bothering a middleman to open it back up just so I can announce an update to my project 5 months later. With the freedom gone, there’s not much going for this place. At least, to me.
If there’s too much stress put upon you, then I completely understand. Your mental well-being is much more important than this dumb lurking activity few honest people probably do. But if the forums are becoming too large, then is getting more forum moderators not an option? Considering how this is a community-wide change, I think it’s wisest to explore all possible avenues instead of being stubborn on “idea good” or “idea bad”. We can afford to be creative. That’s all I have to say regarding this, and hopefully my words mean something.
I have given my opinion on this. What we now disagree on is whether my reasons are right, to which I have repeatedly stated that I do not think that the current state of affairs is fine, for multiple reasons (if a bad shitpost necro bumps a thread, it’s already too late).
I’ve been doing my best to keep my calm here, but boy, it’s statements like this that make me question whether you’ve actually been reading the things I say. This is not changing, the project and creative categories are not under auto-lock timers, as is stated in the OP.
My apologies, it was simply the first example that came to mind. But fret not, I most certainly read the OP. I’ve already said everything I needed to say though, just wished to apologize. Happy trails.
If we’re going to inevitably have a bunch of threads that are locked over time, can we have a Request Unlock button on locked threads? Pressing it would send a notification to mods that it was requested by X user, and then it would also pop up a message asking “Why?” With a text field for the user to input a reason (that if completed also gets sent to mods).
That way people could more easily request for threads to be unlocked and not feel so annoyed or anxious about having to PM mods about it.
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Why are you scared to say their name, Cam. Its @Zoisite. I haven’t found anything wrong with their responses to old threads and I doubt anyone else does either.
Why bother saying this if you clearly don’t care lol. Every single response in this thread has been some form of criticism ranging from “this needs to be adjusted” to “this is unnecessary.” Vilk and Klok gave great feedback and alternatives that more users liked than the original post. This is clearly about the moderator’s experience, not the user’s.
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This is a great idea and I’d honestly implement it in a heartbeat if I could. For now, I think the flag button serves almost the same purpose
Reading through this thread, I see a lot of opposition to the initial post but I’m curious how much of that is against automatic thread locking in general and how much is against the specific proposed deadlines.
I’m seeing 4 general ideas here:
- No change is needed
- We should formally add a rule against necroposting
- The idea is fine but the cutoff is too short. I saw a 30 days period for community threads and 90 day lock off for non community/project/whatever threads
- The idea is fine
Personally, I lean towards the 3rd but I’m not fussed about the 4th either. I was just wondering what other people’s specific problem with the OP was
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locking threads is boring i think most of us are capable of necroing threads if we have something to actually add to it (source: me)
just beat up the useless junk and i think thats ok
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When you lock a thread, We may choose to create a new thread rather than apply to unlock the thread.(w
As a result, I think it only has the negative effect of wasting more threads.
I don’t understand the rational reason why You have to lock the old thread.
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That’s a great question. I can list three threads that would have been affected negatively by this new policy.
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Romhacking Glitches. This thread has had multiple instances of several-months-of-inactivity in the past before someone posted a new glitch and revived the thread.
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Create an Ugly Mug. This thread has also had several months of inactivity, to the point I thought it was totally dead, before someone posted new ugly mugs and restarted the thread with multiple submitters afterwards.
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The Under. Same story. This one is probably less valuable, but still, it exists! It, too, has endured 6+ month stagnation points before popping up unexpectedly.
These threads are insignificant enough that if they were to die off and get auto-locked, most people would find them too troublesome to PM mods and ask to reopen, and obscure enough that I could see mods saying, “Eh, you want me to reopen a thread just so you can post some stupid-looking joke mug?”
Even if the mods have a 100% policy of just instantly reopening when people ask, the mere existence of this friction would probably make people question whether they should even bother contributing to these silly, ‘pointless’ threads.
To answer your question; myself? Not often. But it’s enough of a possibility that I’d never want it to become a thing. I’ve been using forums for a very long time.
Dellhonne’s post is still there. Sounds like the mods aren’t following the existing policy, then.
(Note: Dellhonne has bumped this topic TWICE… the last actual post by Der was in September of 2019. He clearly doesn’t have anything to add. Why weren’t these offtopic posts of Dellhonne’s simply removed and exorcised?)
Edit: Also, also, also…
This is the only instance in the official rules (That I could easily find; the rules are surprisingly difficult to locate) regarding Necroposting, so I find your claim that my proposal is ‘already the official policy’ very hard to believe.
And there’s nothing in the FAQ about it…
Soooooooooooooooooo…
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Sure, I’d be happy to leave those particular threads open. I’m not sure that three threads is enough to convince me that “leave all threads open by default” is the right choice.
The short of it is that, in February, we were having staffing problems due to the global pandemic and so many things slipped through the cracks. Our continuing personnel problems, while somewhat alleviated as of late, are a major factor in why I favor an auto-lock rather than codifying a stricter policy.
yeah i have no idea why the rules are so hard to find, I blame jattwood
To some degree, I agree that the visibility/specificity of the policy (and the rules in general) is pretty lacking, and I’m hoping to address that (partially with this very topic!). On the other hand, it basically already says what it needs to: “Don’t necropost unless you have a good reason to”, for some vacuous definition thereof. As I’ve said a few times now, more goes on behind the scenes than it appears, and the “just delete shitty ones” was already how we handled necros.