Then why not try something less invasive first?
Why not try this first? I still fail to see how this is going to render the forums as utterly useless as you believe. Do I think we can refine it? Sure, but we have to start somewhere.
Because youâve chosen the action with the biggest footprint. âWeâve got this little issue with a leaky pipe in the back room, ahhh knocking down the house will fix thatâ. It will show an improvement in the problem youâre looking to affect, this isnât effective problem solving, this is using a blunderbuss to kill a mosquito.
What you will effectively do is ruin your data, posts will be fragmented as I pointed out above to a point where you canât actually roll this change back. Search will be pointless once again as youâll never know if youâre looking at the new/old post. You might be able to quantify your action by seeing that no more posts are being necroâd but you wonât see things like people not correcting code that no longer works because they canât do it easily or quickly and that is more important to this forum than a once in a blue moon post necro.
A better solution would be to change post times from '19 to 2019 and move the message on reply of older posts to obscure the response so someone has to acknowledge that they are necroâing an old post. Then youâll get some actual data on has this change made a difference, if not THEN make more drastic changes, not go in guns blazing as has been done here. Its crazy.
The fact that weâre having this discussion is adding data to the test. Youâre not being ignored, weâre just looking at everything â including the points you make.
One issue, though, is that editing old posts has been disabled for quite some time. Sure, this will mean they canât update old topics that contain those posts, but it might be better for them to have the clean slate of a new thread in those cases so that people donât have to dig through a bunch of now irrelevant commentary.
As for search, it can be sorted by post date now.
Hmm, youâve made the decision and implemented the change without seemingly thinking through the possible ramifications, all this is doing is finding out how it now impacts things going forward.
Donât get me started on editing posts. Iâm not on about editing posts though Iâm on about updating threads with code on or stepped solutions e.g.
- Fred searches for a problem related to printing
- Fred finds an old post that looks like its what he needs
- Fred tries the code and notices it doesnât work in latest due to reasons (api2/os change/whatever)
- Fred works out the problem and responds to the thread with updated code.
Now itâll be:
- Fred doesnât update the forum because he canât be bothered to PM a mod and wait for the thread to be reopened, he just wants to get on with coding. (You canât check for this)
or
- Fred doesnât bother following up on this because he canât ask a question in the thread that talks about it, does this forum not like people asking questions, what a grumpy forum, Fred leaves, never to return. (You canât check for this)
or
- Fred creates a new post with the updated code meaning there are now two search hits for that search and no historic context on the thread unless he remember to and links back to the original correctly.
Yes but now the change will be liming people to searching by post date over post relevancy for the entire userbase on the request of a few users. Relevancy is the default option, does ever user now need to effectively search twice, once by Relevancy, once by Date just to make sure there isnât a newer thread about exactly the same thing?
With outdated posts being now automatically closed after a while, searching for solutions is also disconcerting.
Until now, I used to search for existing threads about my problem and only if I found none would I create a new one.
With outdated threads that can no longer be updated (unless someone wants to spend time asking a moderator to re-open it), I wonât waste my time searching if the first result(s) I get is/are just no longer accurate.
Yet, I hate having duplicating threads for the same discussion and searching first has always been encouraged everywhere (for good reasons, like the forum being âconsolidatedâ), but I still more hate spending my time trying various threads because some are just now immutable.
I expect duplicate threads will start to flood and searching to be not done prior to askingâŠ
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And thatâs what you should still do.
You canât add a new posting to an old thread, but maybe it already answers your question and you wonât need to ask again.
Would you really search every time you have a question if threads get duplicated over the years and the search results now give you 10 possible threads to look at?
Waste of time.
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Itâs a terrible, terrible idea to lock old threads. As others have pointed out, closing old topics can only lead to fragmentation of information, with multiple threads pointing at each other and less clarity and continuity. Not infrequently I come upon an old thread in a forum and have useful information to add - if that thread is closed Iâm really not going to open a new topic saying âHey, if anyoneâs interested I have a solution for this problem discussed in 2017â. But if the thread is not closed, I will happily add my new info to it, for the benefit of future seekers.
Conversely, I very often make use of information in old threads when searching for solutions to problems Iâm having, and I really like it when all of the combined community wisdom is aggregated in one thread. I donât care how long it is, I have an adult attention span.
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Side note, I tried to search for something related to xojo in google, and to my surprise, there were 10âs of results from the last few days. I thought to myself, surely there canât be that many posts about this issue, it must have been fixed ages ago. The retroactive locking of posts caused google to index all old posts as if they were last updated âJul. 22, 2020â.
Itâs kinda like the time I rsyncâed my server without the preserve metadata flag and caused all my files to have the same creation date, broke all my sorting. Itâs probably not easy now but it should have made the date of each âlocked messageâ 1.5 years after the last post.
I must say that I agree with Julian. I donât see the advantage of closing threads. IMO it complicates things. And 6 months is not very long. If I look up a topic and it is now locked why is that helpful? It sort of implies that it is so old that it is no longer relevant.
If I think there is now a solution or a better solution to the problem referenced, this is the natural place to add the information rather than creating a new thread. Or if I have some ancillary question about the same topic, it seems that this is a good place to put it.
Now a future search will result in more hits and more wondering around even if people have been sophisticated enough to add links.
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The lock was made recently, this is portably due to the move from the old forum to the new one. I canât recall it but I think that was around that time.
My bad, you are right. For some reason I thought it was the locking that did it because every post I looked at had the lock message at the bottom. I guess that one is out of our control, I would have thought google would look at the article date and not the date the link changed.
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That would implicit that if you are a historian writing about something in 1412 ⊠if will never get known by a search engine :-). Just kidding, thatâs very often (especially, if switching platforms, a pain in the neck with search engines ).
Looks like I was right in my predictions, thereâs been other occurrences of this but this perfectly demonstrates the issue I was warning about, welcome to fragmentation. I note that this hasnât been corrected by the mods yet and weâll never know if it would have actually been corrected as the creation of this post will skew the data.
Again, as I mentioned above, it would be easier and more manageable to remove the locks and allow people to necro old posts for the betterment of the community as the small number of times this happened is trackable and manageable where as the current system demonstrably isnât.
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I noticed that the system was turned off when I was away from the forum, was there a particular reason why all the old threads werenât reopened?
There would really be no way to determine which topics were closed for cause and which were closed due to their age in an automated manner. If you have a topic that you wish to revive which was closed due to age, just message a moderator and weâll reopen it.
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Werenât all threads automatically closed by System and not staff/mods so there should be a clear separator there?
Not necessarily. Some threads that were closed by staff in the old system may show as closed by System due to the migration. I donât have all of the details, but if you have a thread to reopen, we can do it.
If User=System And Date > New Forum date then re-open ?
If I scrape the forum for a massive list of threads to open and provide you a list would they all be opened or is that a waste of both of our times?