Hello,
Please consider to not allow posting a new reply to old topics.
Kind of auto lock them after a year of no replies.
This avoids someone searching abs finding an old topic and replying to it.
Thanks.
yeah, very rarely it might make sense to “reply” ( for instance, if something is not working the way it was described etc. ), but I second your suggestion. In that case a poster should as well open a new topic and she / he can still refer to the older post via link. Especially as the some functions, like pretty-printing code, did not survive the migration to this new tool, I think the old stuff should only be readable.
And I still believe it would be helpful to have a channel for web1 and one for web2 …
But time may render the information in the original thread obsolete, and if the new information is not added to that thread it may become incorrect.
For example, I believe this request originated because of the following thread: 64 bit apps. Worth it?
And in that case a change in the OS seems to have caused problems not present originally, so someone reading the original thread without the newer posts could get the wrong conclusion.
My 2 cents.
Julen
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When you reply to an old thread you are shown the following message however it would be better if this was obscuring the text entry area until it was dismissed as it can be easily overlooked and I’m not sure how long it takes to display this message (weeks/months/years?).
Revive this topic?
The last reply to this topic was almost 5 years ago. Your reply will bump the topic to the top of its list and notify anyone previously involved in the conversation.
Are you sure you want to continue this old conversation?
I’m not sure locking is the best option as there are rare occasions when this is useful and how often does this actually happen to necessitate a remedy?
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It happens to me that I see a topic, the most recent post is (say) today, look through it but don’t notice the dates because the date is in faint grey and not where the other posting info (name, channel) appears. So I just see a topic and go off and reply to some earlier point in the topic.
Only later do I notice that today’s post is only some piffling comment and that the post I actually replied to was made 2 years ago. Then I feel a bit annoyed because I’ve likely wasted everyone’s time.
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This is a good suggestion to avoid confusion. Topics that were started over 1.5 years ago have now been closed. Going forward, topics will auto close 6 months after the last reply.
In those rare instances where it does make sense just pm a forum moderator to re-open the topic.
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Thank you thank you thank you 
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Ah-ha. This explains it.
I was getting paranoid .
i assume we get still read them without ability to reply
Nothing stops you referring to an old topic, AFAIK. If a topic is a couple of years old, likely the detail of what was being debated then will have changed.
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Yes, they are still there so you can read or link to them if you need to.
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I fail to see how having multiple threads on the same topic, some with out dated information is a good idea. When you do a search, rather than having a couple of threads to scroll down to the current state, you’ll have multiple threads to trawl through.
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Even so I have been in favor, I think only time will tell us if this really works.
But I suppose @Dana_Brown can change it back any time. It’s probably best to give it a try now for several weeks and see if this works well or if we have overlooked something.
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Are you going to put this information on all those lock messages as people will not know about this unless they happened to have read this exact post.
100% agree, goodbye useful new search on the new forum, looks like we’re going back to old useless search. Bravo.
I doubt they’d be able to fix the thread fragmentation at a later date as I doubt people will either know how or be kind enough to put in the relevant links back to the original threads.
Moderators literally have the ability to remedy this situation by splitting threads if they see a new post is a thread necro mistake.
All you’ve successfully done here is:
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waste all users time (both current and future) as people can no longer quickly add to old threads to post updated code without asking a mod to reopen the read then waiting. Chances of that happening for someone in the moment with the code in another window ready to paste, zero.
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buried all the purposefully locked threads so its now harder to find them for future reference.
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used a hammer to crack a nut
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That’s one view. My view, from the time I was still a beginner:
- Lost a lot of time, as a beginner, dealing with outdated code, mainly because I did not recognize that it was outdated. I agree, that this helped (as I am stubborn) on my learning curve ;-).
- When replying to an old thread, you rarely got a reply, or someone telling you that it’s outdated …
- Nowadays I find it time-consuming reading or replying that this topic is outdated and not working any longer.
But I agree that it might turn out to be not ideal and that the moderators could help a lot, but this would be a full-time job. To my knowledge, they are not (all) full-time employees ;-). I don’t think anything is bad about trying it out for 2-3 weeks …
This still exists.
This still exists but now you have two threads about it.
This still exits as you have a new thread to read.
Let me put it another way…
Person A reads old locked thread (T1), makes a new thread (T2) asking a question about something in the locked thread.
You now have two threads to search (T1, T2).
Person B performs a similar search some time later and see’s the old thread (T1), makes another new thread (T3) about it because they didn’t know T2 existed and resolved T1’s issues.
Now, you have three threads (T1,T2,T3) all relating to the same information and T1 STILL hasn’t been corrected so you could end up with Tn. Crazy
This is not a good way to fix this issue.
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Yes, I agree with you - all fair points. My hope would be that we can easily identify old and closed threads. It is good that we have this exchange here. My only aim is to improve the experience.
- That’s the reason I am as well in favor to have the thumbs up/down feature back.
- Moderators could help in marking a solution in case the PO doesn’t do it.
- I still believe splitting Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 in different categories will help. Of course there are overlaps and some solutions for Web 1.0 are still working fine in Web 2.0, but on the other hand they are both 2 completely different approaches …
@anon20074439
this one is a good example Printing to specific printer impossible? that we are both right and wrong …
How big is the problem?
1 old topic get a new response a month per 10 topics? per 100? per 500? more?
What I have seen is that most people create new topics or post to newer topics.
The problem I see is that several old topics with responses in the last 2-6 months were closed. New topics have the warning that they are going to be auto-closed after 6 months without responses. If the new policy is to lock old topics after 6 months without responses then it makes sense to close only old topics without a response in the last 6 months and not lock topics with posts within 6 months. Some of them could be still relevant and will make people interested in them to ask a mod to re-open (I don’t think most people will do this), mention that the topic was closed for no reason creating a new topic or just move on without posting.
This is a big chance on how the forum will work from now on and for that reason, we will see people in favor or against the change. Is this better? I don’t know, but I do think that the “problem” was very small to have this big change. In the end, it may have a bigger impact (bigger problem) than just handle the X number of cases where old posts were revived and that could be handled by a mod in no time.
why is this closed when the last message is 3 days ago?