Alright, so let me give you folks a little bit of background on the how and why the necro rule came about and then we can get into the reason its hard to set a hard and fast rule around it.
The Why
There's a few main reasons why we want folks to avoid necroing old posts:
- The older a post is, the less relevant the information in that post becomes to the current state of Solus and its software. Creating a new post encourages folks to share recent experiences and information, which can avoid confusion with old solutions that are no long valid, as well as avoiding the spread of misinformation through the tribal knowledge of the forums.
- More often than not, discussions tend to get increasingly off-topic as more and more replies get added. Folks have a habit of commenting on old threads for things that actually aren't related to the original purpose of the topic, which doesn't really help the main discussion.
- Some people hijack old threads to ask something unrelated or something they think is totally unrelated. This ends up creating sub-topics inside of a thread that aren't easily discovered, making it harder to find information, not easier.
The How
We switched from phpBB to Flarum a few years back because phpBB was becoming difficult to moderate, especially when it came to spam posts. Flarum was then (and is now) still quite new and a lot of functionality just wasn't there. So we scouted around for extensions and things to get it to the experience we have today. Being able to Lock posts is pretty rough around the edges in Flarum. Namely:
- Posts can't be auto-locked after a fixed period of time being idle.
- All locks need to be manually put in place by a moderator.
- There aren't any extensions that add support for (1), but there are extensions that close threads after they reach a certain age.
So (1) puts us in a bad starting place to enforcing a necro rule. We can't use an extension for (3) because long-running threads would end up getting locked and then follow-up threads would litter everything. And enforcing locking via (2) requires that we audit all old posts to see which ones need to be locked. There are over 6k discussion threads on here already. That's a lot of work to go back and retroactively enforce a rule. I can also say that we have historically tried to close old Tasks on the Dev Tracker and it can seriously take several days for one person to go through all of the open Tasks and decide when to close them. Doing something similar for threads here is a lot of extra work for very little benefit.
As far as why there isn't a hard and fast rule for when a post should not be necroed, it really boils down to it being hard to decide when feedback is no longer needed or relevant. I can pretty confidently say if something has been inactive for over a year, it's best to open a new topic and not let the old one get in the way of the discussion. I personally have only ever enforced necroing for posts that are inactive (from the date of the last comment) for over 6 months. If its a few days/weeks/months after the post went inactive, continuing the discussion may be useful. It a solution was never found for a problem, it might actually be important to resurrect that thread. There's really no one-size-fits all rule we can apply.
Wrap up
So I've more or less clued you all in on the important bits about this rule. I definitely recognize that we can do more to help others be aware that rules like this exist, and I'll be working with @JoshStrobl to see if we can't decide on a good place to document that. I'm open to feedback on what limits to set around necroing, but I would also ask that y'all please respect our decision when we do make those changes.
And lastly, I do want to say that we aren't trying to be hostile in enforcing this. We pretty much have a three strike system when it comes to each of the rules we enforce here. Meaning if any moderator has to tell you more than twice, it's a bannable offense. We hold everyone to this standard and I promise you we do not make decisions like that out of malice. And I hope you can understand now why this necroing rule is important to how these forums operate.
Cheers.
