If you have a question regarding the content of an old thread, surely the best place to post it is on the thread in question. The OP might not still be around to answer but the rest of the community is.
For instance, I still play this on occasion "Shooter In The Abstract" - Community Showcases - Unity Discussions
I think I downloaded it two years ago and never figured out what on earth the black bar at the bottom of the game screen actually does. The link to Willem’s page where you can download the game is still active on the thread, so whoever views it can still enjoy it. After the thread lock, I had to send the OP a PM to see if he’s still around to answer.
On other forums, I’ve seen certain threads resurrected from years ago. Some start from 2001, then get bumped at say 2006 and then to present time.
It’s down to the viewer to check the date/time stamp awhile reading the content. Active thread is still active
Well that’s exactly it. The issue isn’t age, it’s activity. And necroing a dead thread is typically considered bad form whether it’s from a month ago or a decade ago, unless what you have to say is not just on a similar topic but also specific to that actual conversation.
i remember sometime when i was looking for HOURS for some information…
and someone actually asked my question on some forum, then the next reply is a mod saying “no one cares, this is really old, locking” BUT I CARED!!! , like 2 years later, but it was still relevant information… someone may have answered that dude… but noooo whiney internet fools and their stupid rules…
but yeah it depends on the thread… like a dumb conversation vs technical information…
There’s very few situations in which necroing a thread is more appropriate than either starting a new one with a link to the old one in the OP, or directly messaging conversation participants.
Long-lived threads are usually bad - particularly on technical forums - because the content goes stale. It’s not good for useful state-of-the-art information to be attached to the end of obsolete information. (FWIW, I do consider this to be a bad practise in the Asset Store forum).
Why though? Better to collate information in one centralised thread instead of having hundreds of spots all over the place. It’s like having a couple of hundred databases to do what is perfectly acceptable with one…
I don’t get this whole frowning on reviving threads silliness.
Only complaint I have with that is figuring out which part is the necro and which isn’t. Shame the forum doesn’t have a way to automatically jump to the location of the necro.
Yea the date stamps are in horrible positions, it should be where most of us are trained to look, top right corner!
It should also be clear to read, not tiny and faded.
Wasn’t the whole point to new forum software to make changes easier?
Because you’ll have a lot of people trying to continue with conversations that were abandoned months ago. If I see a thread in the first page I expect that most of the posters in there are only 1 or 2 days away, not a few years.
Superpig hit it there, a few months, fine, a year or so, yeah if it’s still relevant. Most of the time, we see things from 3-5 years old being bumped with “actually you do it like this…[insert how to fix 5 years old obsolete problem with something that was built into the editor 2 years ago]” It can be confusing to people looking down a list topics on the forums.
That’s for technical stuff, for gossip, well, no one wants a 3 year old argument to rise from the dead. There are examples of keeping old threads open though, there was an old topic that was necro’d recently about a user trying to find other users in their country, which is totally fine to keep open.
P.s. No one in the history of the internet has really paid attention to date stamps, no matter how large.
“Bad” - not much detail there, care to expand? I don’t understand the concept of “content goes stale”. Is it really the case that most necros are obsolete information? Personally I think its just another example of inconsistent and thoughtless moderation.
Yes, most necro’d threads in the technical forums involve bringing obsolete information back to the fore. We’re mostly not talking about core computer science concepts here (many of which haven’t changed since the 60s…) but stuff like ‘what’s the best way to approach making a 2D game in Unity’ - threads prior to the release of 4.3 don’t include any discussion of Unity’s built-in 2D framework, and any useful discussion on making a 2D game in Unity really needs to touch on it (whether positively or not).
Some might argue that preventing necro of such threads doesn’t make a difference because people are still going to find the old threads on Google and read the content - but a) Google does take the age/activity of content into account, and b) encouraging the creation of new threads over necroing old ones helps to avoid ‘megathreads’ which have bad search granularity.
