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.
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
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.
That’s a great question. I can list three threads that would have been affected negatively by this new policy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, given that this seems to be so unpopular, I have a different proposal –
I am planning to perform a one time sweep of the community category to start a 30 day timer on all of those threads, so if there are no posts within a month of that timer being set, they’ll be locked. This will not apply to new threads, at least for the time being. After that month, I’ll wait a little longer to see how much demand there really ends up being on old threads, and then revisit this overall policy.
I’ll also take suggestions on particular threads to exempt from this (The Under and the glitches thread, for example), but no promises.
The point is that I could name three in the first place. I’m sure I could name plenty of others if I really cared. This feels like special pleading, or moving the goalposts.
…Never mind. I don’t even care at this point. Just do the thirty day thing and maybe things will work out just fine.
So, what are we going to be looking forward to, concretely? I ask because it may be beneficial to compile everything that is agreed upon and different from the OP, possibly edit the OP.
I don’t know if either of these would be possible but:
When bumping a thread that hasn’t been posted on in over 3 months, instead of appearing at the top of most recent posts, have it appear near the bottom of the page. (If someone responds to it afterwards, that response would be less than 3 months, so it would bump to the top.)
Or
When posting on threads with no response within the last year, it doesn’t bump the thread. That way people could easily add responses to historic threads if they really wanted to, but it wouldn’t really affect the general users.
Just some ideas. Might not even be possible, though.
Just add a line in the rules that says you shouldn’t post in [category] threads after [number] days unless you’re the OP. This has been a common feature in almost every forum on the internet for the past 30 years, so I don’t imagine it’d be difficult to enforce here in this smaller community.
Doesn’t make you re-invent the wheel with fancy Discourse coding.
Doesn’t make OPs have to go through needless hoops to post in their own threads.
Doesn’t fill your forum with locked threads.
Gives mods a “legal” justification for removing these necros, something they clearly didn’t have up until now.
right, after talking with the staff for a bit after the frankly astonishing unpopularity of this change, we’ll be shelving this policy for the time being. there was, in fact, a line in our FAQ saying not to make pointless posts (even before recent edits, which you are welcome to look up for yourself), but hopefully the current wording will make it more clear.
that said, i am reserving the right of the staff to manually activate thread timers on specific threads without notice in extreme cases.
Don’t post no-content replies. We reserve the right to delete and lock threads if pointless bumping becomes a problem.
I definitely approve of shelving the auto-lock policy, but I’d suggest going for clearer wording regarding what’s actually allowed. This doesn’t tell much about what constitutes “pointless bumping”.
Based on this OP, apparently the mod team considers “7 days” to be the limit in Community, and 30 days elsewhere. “Projects”, “Creative” and “Drafts” are seemingly all exempt from the auto-lock, so are necro-posts fine there?
If people aren’t sure what’s cool and what isn’t, the bumping you wanted to stop will… probably continue.
If you don’t wanna clutter the rules with specifics, just link to this thread. You can probably recycle the OP (or make a new post) to explain what is actually permitted.
It’s pretty simply, really. People want the pointless bumping to end. At the same time, going from level 1 to level 99 in one stop gap jump is just absurd. The solution is to go to level ten and bump it up or down from there gradually.
Just make this the official rule. “If a thread is more than 4 weeks old, don’t bump it if you’re not adding anything to the discussion. Memes and requests for more content do not add to the discussion.”
Just to add on -
“Please PM the creator of the thread if you must ask them whether their project is still alive or not many months after their last update.”
Dunno if we really want to be that specific with the rules. But I have seen a number of posts like this.
Only confusing part left is that the 4 weeks thing doesn’t apply to projects in the first place. I am not personally bothered whether the exact number of weeks is specified in the rules or not.
how is asking the thread creators if their projects alive too specific? It take only a minute to fire of a message to them saying that your going to lock the thread temporarily until you get a response confirming or denying the project’s current status, it’s not that complicated. You could even have a basic template you could use for those messages and just swap out a couple variables if required.
I could understand if this would apply to every thread but I certainly think for threads for ROMhacks it is a pretty easy rule that makes life easier for everyone involved since then the thread creators have an immediate contact route and are aware of the thread being locked, not everyone checks the thread every day.
Sorry, I specifically meant when someone necrobumps a project thread simply asking “lol it has been 2 years since the last post, is this project still alive?” which I personally find annoying, so I wouldn’t mind a rule against that specifically, but I’m not that fussed about it either way.
ah, I see. In that regard yeah, I could see an issue with that, they’re super annoying but just flat out banning them seems difficult to enforce, sorry for the mixup.
I actually have a pet peeve with the way old and inactive threads work. Let me explain.
First, I’ll pretend I’m talking about one of my threads. For me, any sort of criticism of a past project, or any feedback about it, any insights gained from playing it, and even something like, “Wow, I really enjoyed this project! The gameplay was fun even if I didn’t enjoy the dialogue!” or whatever; those are all useful posts. Those are good reasons to have my thread open. Truthfully, some people could achieve the same ends by PMing me, but that’s one small layer of friction I don’t like having.
My peeve, however, comes from a decision that most forums, including Serenes and FEU, often or sometimes make. Sometimes one person will make a post after like 6 months in an inactive topic, and their post is worthless. Just “is the proyect ded?” tier posts. Right, so that sucks. But then usually the entire post gets locked, thus preventing other people from leaving valuable feedback!
“Don’t bump old threads with nonsense. Locked.”
I mean, I see it on Serenes more than here, by a wiiiiide margin, but I think it’s worth pointing out. Now the thread, since it’s locked, has zero chance to accumulate valuable feedback, and that’s a shame.
