I don’t think this is enforced and there are and have been many examples of violating this rule.
I have two questions:
Does the Discourse forum software offer support to enforce this? For example, that a post would be closed (locked) automatically if inactive for X days (where X would be large e.g. greater than 365)? If so, should this feature be activated?
I am only lukewarm about such a restriction anyway. I can see circumstances where a hopelessly out of date topic (with information that is no longer applicable) ends up getting reactivated, and that is counterproductive. On the other hand, there are times when the problem / question / solution exactly as described is still valid despite the passage of time. I see no obvious way of automating that distinction. Do forum users think that this rule should be revisited?
I suppose it’s not truly a necro bump if the issue is still “live,” no matter how aged it is.
Me, too. I see in other online fora that auto-close is sometimes used, and sometimes quite prematurely, in my opinion. But then, even if a topic is closed to further replies, one can start a new thread and reference the closed one, so it’s not as if the info from the closed thread disappears into a void. And it’s not as if the same conversation doesn’t ultimately occur anyway.
I suppose it depends on what makes life easier for the staff/moderators. But…
…it probably doesn’t matter what we think about how the forum software is implemented.
In the sense that this category is “Site Feedback”, it matters what we think. That is the purpose of feedback! But, sure, ultimately Purism might have its own ideas and those might differ from what we think and they don’t do what we think.
I never understood the purpose of no-necro rules, especially the suggestion that we should open new topics if we want to add something. Then we end up with dozens of threads talking all about the same thing because there was some inactivity in the discussion. Even if the threads link to one another it’s really not convenient to search and navigate through the discussion. Also I enable notifications on threads I’m interested in but I’m pretty sure I won’t be notified if people create new topics linking to it and reply in the new topic.
Actually I’m pretty sure that you will be notified if someone links to your post. (Whether there’s some time limit on that I have no idea.)
To be fair, if “they” went with X greater than 365 days (as I roughly proposed) then it would take dozens of years in order to end up with dozens of threads.
Not if dozens of different threads that are older than 365 days get parallel necro-ed.
To topic: There are threads where it is fine to continue writing. But there are also threads where it does not make any sense to answer. People just need to find out when it makes sense and when it does not. And since people often does not, many forums made a general rule to stop necro-ing threads.
By the way, there’s already a warning “Are you sure you want to…” pop-up in Discourse when you start to comment on a very old thread. Most people probably ignore annoying Discourse warnings, though. I know I do.
However Site Feedback should not exist as a category if there are never any resources to deal with any feedback. Equally, there is no point having a rule of “DO NOT: …necro” if there are no resources to enforce that by moderation (given that it is seemingly not enforced by software).
Manifestly, Purism resources are consumed on moderating this forum. You can argue about whether that is “good” or “bad”.
Still, if Purism is committed to the rule and it can be enforced in software then no resources need be consumed on moderating the forum as far as enforcing this rule goes.
Sure, Purism will get around to this when they have the resources. They are highly stretched though, so it may take a few days or weeks for us to receive an official response from them.
