Nuances of necroposting

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Continuing the discussion from How to make a app icon for phosh:

I would like to clarify my complaint of necroposting. I would prefer that the current failure to automatically prevent necroposting not be changed. On not particularly rare occasions an old and currently dormant thread is absolutely the best place to post an update especially if the thread is relatively short and provides important context.

The post that triggered my complaint was the straw that broke the camel’s back and was my no means the most egregious recent example, but it was pretty bad and did not add to the topic in any way.

It is very aggravating to be away from the forum for a bit less than 2 days, come back and see a couple of dozen threads with new posts with interesting subjects, but it turns out that half of them land me on post #1 with hundreds or over a thousand posts to go. Then it turns out it has been dormant for 5 to 10 years and has only a single new post that has neither new nor relevant information, but is just an umpteenth reiteration of a dubious opinion with no reasoned justification provided. It is the sheer rate of these posts that pushed me over the edge, especially since gentle admonishments from multiple people over a long period of time have had no effect.

But, to be very clear, please do not push for automated enforcement of the rule against necroposting, especially since progress in Purism land is so glacial and sporadic.

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To be clear, even though I made those observations, I wasn’t jumping to ask Purism to change the Discourse config if a suitable change is even possible. I have not done so. I had no specific plan to do so.

(By suitable change, I would mean something like: the forum software automatically closes a topic if there are no further replies after X years. Quite a few forums do operate like that. However I haven’t gone looking to see whether Discourse can do that. And, again, I am not jumping to change anything. Just musing.)

Personally, I would prefer that if there is a 5 year old, dormant but highly relevant topic then the user create a new topic and then link back to the, what would by then be closed, old topic.

This allows more flexibility in that there can be more than one highly relevant old topic and the user can link them all as background reading / things already tried etc. and link specific posts in the old topics (e.g. where the old topics are lengthy and most of the posts are not relevant, and most forum users are going to TLDR if directed to the old topics as a whole). This of course puts the onus on the creator of the new topic to do more work.

As an observation about Linux in general, not specifically referring to this forum, it is very easy to perform a search about a problem and waste a lot of time reading old posts that refer to problems that were indeed problems but were fixed 10 major versions ago. A forum is not always a good solution for this requirement, where a more formal and more curated Knowledge Base may better suit e.g. staff member takes responsibility for going back and recording which version actually fixed the problem and user can therefore search only for solutions that should be applicable to the version that the user has.

The bottom line though is that the forum rules do say not to necropost. So you are actually requesting two things:

  1. A change to forum rules to allow necroposting (hopefully judiciously!).
  2. No change to the forum config.

You are likely to get 1 out of 2. :wink: At least in the short term. So the poster has the possibility of exercising judgement as to whether necroposting is appropriate and the moderator then passes judgement on the post. (Most of the time when I see unhelpful necroposts, I will close the topic, whether or not I delete the necropost.)

I think the generic problem is that most instances of necroposting in this forum are unhelpful i.e. not relevant, not adding value, not continuing a topic with highly relevant new information.

Some AI (and other) spammers are now generating somewhat relevant but very generic replies to old posts in order to get their forum cred points up. So there is an increasing cost to allowing necroposting. (Forum users may not always see these posts because most of the time I remove both the post and the user before the post becomes visible.)

Yes, if a config change did ever happen then X would have to make allowances for that.

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I think it can. Topics created in the e.foundation community forums almost always display an auto-generated “This topic will automatically close in (timeframe)” notice at the bottom. Different categories or tags may elicit different closure periods, but I haven’t really paid attention. It seems to be a source of annoyance for many partiipants there.

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Although noting that the two topics that I looked at in that forum

a) yes, had quite inconsistent closure periods and users probably don’t like inconsistency, and
b) had quite short closure periods (1 month or 2 months or thereabouts).

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