Don’t most of these forums have a much larger user base though? A forum with a large user base and alot of activity can survive on strict rules like these.
Not so much a small forum.
this will not affect your experience browsing old threads unless you intend to post in said old threads
people generally are hesistant to check locked threads to begin with, as they give the impression that a spam/troll was going on.
I also read a number of old threads and would probably not read them if they were locked already, except for the tutorials I read. Why? Because it is locked - it is closed for discussion, and therefore I should consider it irrelevant to me now.
Vilk put it well:
I think it does affect browsing experience much more than you’re anticipating. It doesn’t straight up prevent users from browsing, but it definitely dissuades them.
if you think you have something productive to add, you can DM me personally and ask. the whole point is that
is being discouraged here.
This seems like a reasonable thing to ask me to unlock a thread for
“the same as it was before” is not the state I’m attempting to preserve here
This is a valid point, do you have a suggestion for making it less strict that isn’t “throw it out the window”? The suggested policies like “just let it happen and delete it when it does” are what we already do, and it is unacceptable.
I think this is overblown; if/when people get used to this, it will be less of a problem.
I’d also argue that old threads in e.g. the community category hold little value beyond entertainment anyway – you’re telling me that you won’t read it because “it might be locked due to trolls” but we are literally having a conversation about these threads being locked for another reason, so I don’t buy that you wouldn’t know.
For threads like questions, assets, resources, I’d be open to leaving them open for longer or doing away with the thread timers entirely, but I am seeking to entirely do away with the “hi you make good art will you make me a zelgius sprite???” on 6 month-old threads type requests.
What many of these proposed adjustments fail to address is that, if a thread is bumped with something useless and a mod has to respond/manually lock, it is already too late. The whole point of this policy is to ensure that old threads only resurface for good reasons that would warrant them being reread.
Isn’t that extra workload for the mods though? Or is the work saved from auto locking enough to compensate that?
Imo i think the time limits are a bit on the strict side.
Like 30 days for community and 3 Months for others would be more reasonable, as an example
Neither the TOS nor the FAQ contain the word “bump” or “necro” and you literally posted “i’m regretting not having a no-necro rule” in that one thread i saw locked.
You can’t blame posters for not obeying a rule that hasn’t been communicated to them.
Gee golly, what a surprise. I don’t like posting feedback in a thread that states it’s open to it and being told i just can’t handle change.
Out of curiosity, what happens if the category of a thread is changed while its timer is ticking down?
What I want to know first and foremost is why the status quo needs to be changed at all? If you’re worried about “lmao change bad” arguments, you should address why changing is better than not changing with arguments that have a valid basis on the current state of the forums and where they will be in the future.
The change being made is not necessarily bad, but it’s not necessary and just makes this whole situation feel like a “one bad apple” moment. If you could clearly weigh the pros and cons of changing vs not changing, I’d love to see what your plan is, but defending the concept by saying “what are you going to miss” is not a great argument because, once again, what is being lost is some of the freedom that comes with being a small forum (unlike Serenes), and what is being gained is preventing a problem that doesn’t exist. You’re not quite using a tactical nuke to clean a stain off a countertop, but you may be using a sledgehammer. If you’re seeing something I’m not, I’m willing to listen.
I’m banking that it will be less work than what we are currently doing. If we get to the 30 day mark and find that this is false, then I suppose I’ll have to admit that I was wrong (please don’t take this as an invitation to spam me with thread reopening requests in 31 days).
I could get behind this.
Because discourse is dumb, we might need a mod to manually change the timer to the new correct value.
by member base, we are the same size as serenes
I have personally deleted an unreasonable number of necros off threads in the past two months.
this is not to deal with the single bump on the mangs thread (in fact, this policy wouldn’t even prevent that), but it did remind me that it’s a thing that i need to do
Are we by usage though? We have tons of dead accounts and activity in this forum is not very high whatsoever. Most posts are probably on the same 30-50 or so threads, anyhow.
I appreciate addressing the necro concern. Of course I can’t see the useless necroposts, but I don’t have a statistic regardless.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.