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Necro threads - what's the big deal?


BobbyGeorge
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I've noticed that people here get upset when an old thread is brought up. I wonder why? I'd rather have a big thread full of relevant material than a hundred threads about the same topic. Fair enough if someone just randomly picks a 2014 thread and replies with "Bump", but if there's an update or something to add, why get peeved about it? I don't see other forums get so tetchy about this.

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People and view points change over time.

When you bring up something very old... you prevent people from moving forward... locking them into their past.

Even if it's not something involving drama... it's still very disruptive to human nature to lock people in time forever...

Human beings NEED the ability to forget in order to be able to learn and grow... Even trivial things need to be able to be moved past...

Edited by Pussycat Catnap
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2 hours ago, BobbyGeorge said:

I've noticed that people here get upset when an old thread is brought up. I wonder why? I'd rather have a big thread full of relevant material than a hundred threads about the same topic. Fair enough if someone just randomly picks a 2014 thread and replies with "Bump", but if there's an update or something to add, why get peeved about it? I don't see other forums get so tetchy about this.

You must not have been on very many forums then because it's one of the longest running forum etiquette rules in existence.

Rather than retyping everything I have said uncountable times, on various forums over the decades, you can read this thread:

 

Edited by Selene Gregoire
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It's a big deal?

I didn't know that. I know some people get annoyed by it and others don't, and there are valid reasons for both. In old, basic internet etiquette, such as it is, necroposting is frowned upon. ho-hum. I fall smack in the middle of the "big deal" because sometimes it is annoying and sometimes I do it, whether I realize it at the time or not. The way this forum is set up, it is very easy to jump on what looks like a new thread that is in fact several years old.

It isn't a big deal. It's a thing. People get bored and comment on things. Like this OP.

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Aside for the pure annoyance of seeing someone raise a five-year-old thread from the grave just to say  "Me too!", the only real problem I see with necroposting is that it occasionally re-triggers a flame war over an issue that was settled ages ago.  Some disagreements are best left in the past, not resurrected.

 

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3 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

It's because the old threads are usually filled with irrelevant facts and solutions. They were good four years ago but SL is constantly changing and making previous information obsolete.

This!  and even if on page 3 someone posted more relevant information people dont read past the first page to see that and walk away with an answer that might have been correct in 2012 but in 2019 (almost 2020 btw scary)  is completely wrong. 

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I still read Qie, Void, Dora, Ryan, Andrew, and others' postings in the old forums that only exist in archives. There are fundamentals there that we.all build on. Oh, and Cory too among many others. 

Necro posts can be very relevant and valuable in the creation forums, and should continue to be allowed there. 

In contrast, General Discussion threads are mostly frivolous and should auto lock after 24 hours IMHO. 

Edited by Desiree Moonwinder
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2 minutes ago, Desiree Moonwinder said:

I still read Qie, Void, Dora, Rand, Andrew, and others' postings in the old forums. There are fundamentals there that we.all build on. 

Absolutely.  So do I.

I think the necro responses that annoy me most are the ones that point out some "error" -- often with derogatory language -- that was perfectly correct at the time of the original posting.  Until about 2014, for example, scripters did not have a PRIM_ROT_LOCAL parameter that we could use to get or set the rotation of a child prim easily.  At that time, if someone asked how to set a local rotation, we would have to walk through some rather laborious logic to answer.  Every once in a while, I will see a necro response from some moron new person who says, rather impolitely, "All of that is a stupid waste of time.  Anyone knows that all you have to do is use PRIM_ROT_LOCAL."  

I do my best to bite my tongue when I see that sort of response, but I'll often at least point out that it's a necro thread.  

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I've been a forum administrator since 2002,   The members on my site look at bumping of old topics as rude,  we point out how to use our forum and even have stickies that detail our rules and we still get people that do it,  so we had to take measure to go through and lock everything older than 6 months.    But this is how I handle it with my team,  I'm Not LL and I'm not going to be a back seat moderator.

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3 minutes ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

I've been a forum administrator since 2002,   The members on my site look at bumping of old topics as rude,  we point out how to use our forum and even have stickies that detail our rules and we still get people that do it,  so we had to take measure to go through and lock everything older than 6 months.    But this is how I handle it with my team,  I'm Not LL and I'm not going to be a back seat moderator.

I always created an archive and just moved inactive threads to the archive where they automatically became read only. New threads could be started with a link to the old in the OP. When the new thread died out, it could be merged with the old archived thread. There is no need to lock each thread. And yes the archive was structured the same as the active forum. It was a standard feature in the forum software for all the forums I set up and admined.

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4 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

I think the necro responses that annoy me most are the ones that point out some "error" -- often with derogatory language -- that was perfectly correct at the time of the original posting. 

Well, Rolig, I've responded to some of your older posts over in the scripting forum.  For example, the simple menu system.  It was helpful to get a reply in-context.

8 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

Aside for the pure annoyance of seeing someone raise a five-year-old thread from the grave just to say  "Me too!", the only real problem I see with necroposting is that it occasionally re-triggers a flame war over an issue that was settled ages ago.  Some disagreements are best left in the past, not resurrected.

I certainly agree with that, but it pertains to the People Forum, mostly.  The scripting forum is different.  

Auto-lock for the People forum would be a good-thing, in my opinion.  The scripting forum, not so much. 

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1 minute ago, Erwin Solo said:

Auto-lock for the People forum would be a good-thing, in my opinion.  The scripting forum, not so much. 

I don't see an easy one-size-fits-all solution for any of the forums.  There are some timeless threads in the GD forum that have been going on for years and have a huge, loyal following. It would be a shame to lock those or any of the game threads.  Those don't invite necroposting anyway.  And yet, you're right that some others would be better archived than left open like festering wounds (not to put too fine a point on it).  There are also plenty of threads in the Creation forums and in Answers that contain outdated information that is either misleading or incomplete or flat out wrong today.  I'd love to be able to lock some of those and hang a flag on them that says "Historically interesting but not current," the way that LL labels some parts of their wiki. 

No matter what anyone did with all those old threads, you can be sure that there would be a fair amount of argument over individual cases.  There'd be lots of judgment calls, and loads of clock hours -- at sizeable cost -- to do the work. In the end, I don't know that we'd be much better off than we are right now either.  If I were doing corporate planning for LL, I wouldn't recommend making it a high priority project.

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55 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

If I were doing corporate planning for LL, I wouldn't recommend making it a high priority project.

I suppose not.  Just because something is popular isn't a reason to keep it; that depends on whether any of the people involved spend any money in the game.  I guess LL knows, and hopefully decides wisely.  I guess storage is cheap these days;  I just don't see anything in the General Discussion Forum as being of archival value.  Seems like one could delete it all on a 30 day rolling basis with no loss.  Let the wayback machine people archive it; they do so anyway.  Okay; obviously I don't get it.  I'm out-a-here.  

Edited by Erwin Solo
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Well, deleting on a rolling basis is a different proposition than locking.  There might be some merit in that since, as you imply, it's hard to think of a reason to go back and consult most of the old stuff in GD.  Still, because storage is pretty cheap, there's not a big cost savings in deleting older stuff instead of archiving it or just letting it grow in place.  I think the easy, practical solution in GD -- and probably most of the People subforums -- is to do nothing.

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14 hours ago, BobbyGeorge said:

I've noticed that people here get upset when an old thread is brought up. I wonder why? I'd rather have a big thread full of relevant material than a hundred threads about the same topic. Fair enough if someone just randomly picks a 2014 thread and replies with "Bump", but if there's an update or something to add, why get peeved about it? I don't see other forums get so tetchy about this.

You can name any topic and plenty of people will complain and natter on about it - the internet simply makes that worse.

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Personally, I always suspected that the hostility towards Residents who Necropost was driven by the rising storm of “alert” emails that reopening a contentious thread brings on.

Residents who are new to Forums often search for interesting topics to respond to as a means of introducing themselves. Unfortunately, that reignites the storm of *email alert*, *email alert*, *email alert*..... And rage ensues.

Personally, I regularly unfollow old material in my account settings and this seems to handle this without having to shut off email alerts completely.

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Edited by AmandaKeen
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17 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

if there's new information then tacking it onto the thread helps those who are googling for an answer to a question.

And thats in essence the problem with what feels like around 99% of all necrothreads: There is no new information and there is nothing helpful added. Its ranting, its me-too, its digging up and re-heathing either drama or outdated discussions. Or responding to personal questions of people, who are probably not in SL anymore or might have managed to solve their problem some time in the past 10 years.

Its clutter.

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Brings up out of date information that may no longer be relevant at all and involves discussion with users who most likely aren’t here anymore.

Its particularly problematic in the technology threads, where someone pulls up some ancient issues from years ago and has some similar problem. Chances are that actual thread is entirely irrelevant to the new problem.

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