[forum] Warning before necroposting?

necro posting is often an issue on tech boards due to how quickly information goes out of date. While at the same time, the history provides a searchable database of potential problems. Personally I don't see a problem with necro so long as it's not some fool saying something like "lol noob", or gibberish like that.

 

I can see this working. Maybe a less silly icon could be used, but even a skull is fine to represent a dead thread.

 

Or even just a dialog saying something like "This thread has been inactive for a long time. Are you sure you want to bring it back instead of starting a new one?" There are plenty of valid reasons why you might indeed want to raise an old thread again, the point is just to help people avoid doing it by accident, right?

 

How about nothing since its so rare it's not an issue.

 

Yeah, sure, Internet must be a mindless stupid thing that has no memory, let it be something like twitter or facebook.

 

I can't see how a reminder would make it any more of an issue.

 

Plain, old spam should we wiped out as fast as possible, and old threads (3 months+?) should have a big, red warning box in front the reply field saying: "THIS THREAD IS OLDER THAN LAZARUS LONG! ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO POST?". There, solved a world problem

 

<_<

>_>

LOL NOOB!



/ducks, covers, and runs

Actually I do appreciate the irony in necroing an old thread about necroposting to address recent necro'ed threads.

I don't see what's wrong with a warning when reviving an old thread. It's not going to stop you from posting if you think you have a really good reason to do so.

 

First off. Haaaa. And may I add

The warning should contain a clause about humiliation if the reason for necro wasnt valid.

 

That is a question only God can answer.

 

I still see necroposts on a regular basis. Still in favor of a warning.

 

So it appears this topic has not been resolved........

 

What if the resolution was "no."?

 

I have myself necroposted recently and frankly, I hesitated between helping a few people that would find the page via search engine, or try hard not to bother people looking at the top of the forum section (I suppose it only concerns people who are enabling notifications for the whole forum? I did that for UI once and then gave up on it, there were too many threads that didn't concern me).

I was suggesting to add an opt-out checkbox "Do not bump to top of threads (check this when adding minor information to old threads)" in the post options; or possibly the opt-in equivalent.

It would be convenient for minor comments that are worth saying to people watching the thread / finding the page via search engine, but not worth saying to everybody else.

Problem is, options are currently hidden in More Options... which some people may miss.

If the checkbox is opt-in (Bump), then most people will miss it and most posts won't bump at all.
If the checkbox is opt-out (Do not bump), then most people will miss it and necro will bump as usual.

So it may be a good idea to always show the options (as in other forums) in combination with this (we should anyway, some people may forget to subscribe to new posts because of this).

We could combine this with the warning system: if thread is old, ask confirmation to bump (opt-in is checked, or more importantly if opt-out is unchecked).

Finally, we could combine this with the Resolved status suggested in another thread: https://forum.unity.com/threads/forum-feature-request-mark-a-thread-as-resolved.272834/
If thread is resolved, the checkbox is set not to bump by default (you could argue that forum threads are for open discussions only and Unity Answers for closed discussions, and I would agree, but sometimes we need a thread to post answers in a longer format, esp. when sharing big code snippets).

Realistically though, it seems that Unity Forum is using some templated solution (somebody mentioned they'd be looking at a plugin for thread auto-lock for instance), so not sure how much they can modify precise behavior...

 

This is meta AF..

 

We should have a 'Let's all Necro' day where the person who necro's the oldest thread within a 10 minute time limit wins a Goldfish named Dave!