Can we post on old topics? (When and how?)

cipricus

First of all a big thanks to the people that have created this very nice distro!

I am sorry to post this on a grumpy tone but it's just that I don't know how to address this problem: I have posted twice on this forum only to be asked to stop. I want to avoid this but do not know how.

I am not very new to Solus but I am new to the Solus forums. I am a long time Linux and Ubuntu user and like the askubuntu, U&L, and the overall Stackexchange method of communication, and thus I'm a bit surprised by the reaction I have got here and here because I dared to post on discussions that (1) were still open at the date I posted, and (2) were about topics of interest, not "solved" in the proper sense of the term.

Of course, all these details may be object of debate, but it is difficult to debate or even ask about what one should do when the discussion where I have just posted gets closed with a admonition like "This is the second time I've personally had to remind you not to do this" — which almost spook me into opening the KDE Partition Manager on my Kubuntu and into wiping out the Solus partition (as I especially loved the "personally" twist). Seriously now:

I like this distro, I have sometimes some problems, questions and suggestions, I am looking the topics up and google gives me links to such Solus forum questions. They seem open, so I post there only to be accused of something called "necroing" ( I am not a native American-English speaker). I have looked that up (here) and it seems that means

to comment on an internet thread long after the conversation has concluded, often using information
that did not exist at the time of the original thread.

I don't think this definition fits the facts here. The topic was open then, no information was updated or very new, the OP problem is not yet solved, just that the topic was closed after I posted. There is something here I don't understand.

Should I ignore old topics even if interested in them and always post a new one? Always or just sometimes? How to decide when?

How old should they be for me to ignore them?

To me one thing is clear: a big part of the Linux experience is online support from the community of users. Without that I would have never ended up a Linux user. Distro hopping brought me to Solus, I liked it from 3 years ago, but now it seems I have some difficulty in meeting that community on this forum. I am tempted to ask about Solus on Unix&Linux instead of here, but yet again the problem must be with me, as this site must have some special rules that I (obsoletely adapted only to the stackexchange platform) have ignored .

Please help me. And be advised that some people love "necromancers", or at least they pretend they do; the stackexchange people have a seemingly laudative albeit ironic badge for them.

Thanks for your attention.

WetGeek

I've often wondered about some of the admonitions not to "necro" an old thread, while other instances seemed pretty obvious. If such an admonishment were followed by a brief mention of why it was given, that might go a long way towards eliminating the hard feelings that might otherwise develop. A single short sentence should be enough.

And if explaining the reason for the rebuke doesn't seem to make sense, then maybe that's a clue that it shouldn't be posted at all? Perhaps there wasn't really a valid reason for it, after all?

Although a plea for help with a problem may have been made long ago, if it's never been solved, I think it should still be a righteous target for a solution ... even if it's a delayed solution. The original poster, or others with the same issue, might be very grateful.

cipricus

WetGeek

even if it's a delayed solution

Surely we don't have to argue in favor of such an obvious point.

brent

Issue could use some clarity but reviving 2-3 year old information for some threads (that I guarantee is 99% obsolete since 2 years changes everything; packages get upgraded and patched; some terminal commands would not be applicable; or solutions that worked then may not now)--carries some risk in being a red herring for solution seekers. Other than that I agree with WetGeek

WetGeek

brent reviving 2-3 year old information

Although more than 3 years old is generally considered obsolete for corporate workstations, it's mostly a matter of cost of maintenance, expiring OEM warranties, and staffing requirements for their IT (helpdesk) department.

Home users don't often have those worries, and may be very happy with equipment that's far older. Some may have been given older equipment by a relative or friend, or may have found a machine at a thrift store or yard sale. Whatever the source, it may be older that 2-3 years, but still working fine, and still new to that user.

If they search for a solution to a problem that's new to them, or they have a problem with software that's new to them, and get results that are 2 or 3 years old, they shouldn't be scorned for asking questions about it, or seeking more information.

vyzle

Although I've found the vast majority of postings, conversation and help on this forum is very positive, the one thing I've found that has made me less incline to engage on this forum is being told not to necro old posts.

Like the OP I wasn't even sure what that meant to begin with. Each time since I've been careful to post what I thought was relevant information or questions to the thread. It's very easy when you're looking for answers to miss the date on the post you're reading and in the excitement of finding a lead, post something before checking.
I've had threads closed without comment on me before leaving me to figure out why on my own.

I do now, if in doubt, start a new thread and link to the old one. This isn't ideal in my view as it fragments the information around lots of threads. Having chased posts around looking for solutions, it gets confusing when you have 6 browser tabs open when looking for tech help. Maybe I'm doing it wrong 😅 .

I'm sure I've seen on other forums where a thread is locked due to age so no new posts are allowed. This would take any ambiguity out and I'd be fine with that. Maybe having the date of the post very prominent in larger font size/loud colours would be helpful? I think a clarification of what necroing exactly is would be helpful as this thread shows people on the forum have different ideas of when posting to older threads is valid and not.

peace out!

brent

WetGeek I never mentioned nor advocated for scorn...or hardware, but I get your analogy. I research 2-3 year old info all the time in these threads. I was only saying a user should not put faith in info that old but only use it for context. The value of the old threads is they may lead you to a solution (works for me). I had no editorial stance on moderators and commenting. If they prefer old stuff be left in the past, I agree with you there should be some articulation.

WetGeek

brent I never mentioned nor advocated for scorn...or hardware

I realize that. And I wasn't arguing with you, or arguing about you. Just pointing out that older forum search results about older problems might be very relevant to folks for whom those older subjects are still relevant to them.

As this thread continues on, I also want to make it clear that I'm not anti-moderation, or that I believe that no thread should ever be closed (and locked). I'm just against rude moderation. It doesn't take a lot more effort to explain why the moderation was needed.

I'd never heard of the term "necroed" until I'd been here for a couple of years. I'm sure that many don't know what it means until they've been accused of doing it.

brent

elfprince have a feeling they're on it🙂 now.

Also towards WetGeek 's and @elfprince 's points (and op) even something as subtle as an agreed upon red dot next to an existing thread that we all could take as 'code' for "info deprecated/caution in replying" would introduce a self-policing element that would not invite rebuke.
2 cents then I'm out of this one!
edit/omitted word

brent

WetGeek all good and agreed upon, l like the conversations!

elfprince

Perhaps this should be part of the forum guidelines?

WetGeek

elfprince

I agree, but I think another reason for some of the violations is that the violators know of the policy, but can't understand why a question they asked, or additional clarification they need, or a comment about solution they've found elsewhere is in violation of that policy. In fact, I suspect that was the very reason this thread was started.

elfprince

WetGeek Perhaps it would a nice touch to have a pinned message, recommending/asking that forum users start a new post for certain situations (and give examples).
I myself had no idea what a 'necro' meant, except that used in the word 'necromancer', which would not apply in this context. 😆

Harvey

First post you necroed was 2 years old and regarding megasync. You posted to mention flatpaks are available. Which if you search for megasync has been mentioned before, and probably more times I am missing. We don't need people going through necroing every posting that didn't mention that particular solution.

The second post was regarding adding Thunar to the repository. To point out a value add with Thunar. That thread was once again was 2 years old and as datadrake pointed out. The forums are not a valid way to request a package regardless.

Solus does not automatically lock threads, so threads like "song of the day" can be revived as by design they are supposed to be used in perpetuity, and several other niche scenarios such as when the creator of the thread (usually a support request) does not always respond in time or there is an ongoing issue that needs more information or a solution is in the unstable repository and the user will report back once it reaches stable etc etc.

The rules of another forum on the internet are irrelevant.

vyzle

Harvey The rules of another forum on the internet are irrelevant.

I can only hear that in a Dalek voice.
I'll get my coat, I know the way out.

Harvey

vyzle
Every forum has their own rules. Rules from somewhere else are never universally relevant...

elfprince I myself had no idea what a 'necro' meant, except that used in the word 'necromancer', which would not apply in this context. 😆

That is exactly what it refers to. If a topic is dead, then reviving it is necromancy.

DataDrake

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.

WetGeek

DataDrake 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.

Bea, thanks for the very complete explanation. My only thought is, as difficult as it is for moderators to decide when something is a "necro" offense, it's often way more difficult for ordinary forum users to know exactly where the boundaries are.

vyzle

Harvey I 'never' said they were universal or even implied it. I merely suggested it was a function found in other forums, Akin to saying some dogs have short legs, not demanding that all dogs have their legs shortened.

Anyway, DataDrake as usual gives a super informative, thorough, explanation, which covers all the issues. B - you should give seminars on how to post on forums! I'm kidding. I'm sure you have neither the time or inclination though is the world's forums that lose out.

I'm all up to speed on this post necrosis thing now 'thumbs up emoji'

brent

DataDrake (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.

1) clear explanation. when you deliver, you deliver.
2) i had already thought about the people-power required to clear/close audit the old threads. (I still stand by my advocacy of replacing it with a self-policing mechanism). But only wrote to say if you went that route I would volunteer time for this and without doubt many more would. Lay down some clear thread-closing criteria to the volunteers and it could happen. It would give forum members a chance to help take the hassle out of the devs/mods/package maintainers' schedules (if you can keep us all on the same page🙂. )

elfprince

Harvey Thank you for the explanation. 👍️

DataDrake

WetGeek Absolutely. We definitely recognize that and I don't think we've actually banned anyone specifically for this, to date. The main thing I would hope is that people stop and think before they comment on something that's been inactive for awhile.