Why is legit necro-posting a bad thing? I honestly don’t see why this is bad beyond someone just being “annoyed” for no reason? What am I missing here?
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Kind of agree with @jared_kidd here. Why is necroposting bad? People creating new topics will lead to the same amount of activity in the forum’s feeds like “new” and “unread”, but new topics will lack a whole lot of context.
This is kind of also a reverse of the other behavior I’ve seen mods doing where they would merge multiple related topics into one.
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I also have a concern about the new implementation to lock the threads with no activity for 6 months.
Could you explain what the “necro-posting” mean? Could you explain more about the reason why you implemented it?
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Whether a necro-post is good or bad seems to really vary to me. With the content of the thread and the substance of the (necro) post.
The annoying ones, that we usually call “necro-posts”, are in random fairly generic old threads and the necro-poster comes in with nothing of substance at all, or it’s no longer an issue for the OP. I do admit that these are annoying, wastes a tiny bit of time out of your day, but I don’t think it happens too frequently here. Most people here seem to recognize it as a bad necro-post that needs to be left alone so it can sink back to the bottom, so no one else comments & it dies.
Example
Examples I’ve seen is where the OP has a minor issue or even just a question, and the necro-post comes to say nothing more than “me too”, or gives a basic answer to the OP’s question, where you suspect it’s not even an issue for the OP anymore. Either they’ve found a solution on their own, have moved to using something else, or they never sounded like they cared about it much to begin with, posted more as an observation!
But the trouble is that there are posts, that are “technically” necro-posts, that come in to add real substance, to an issue or subject that is still valid and ongoing. This is appreciated, so we don’t really call them nerco-posts so much. Especially when the OP or others add new posts discussing the new information, then the fact that it was technically a necro-post can go by barely even noticed. And in these cases it’s very helpful that the information wasn’t lost to a separate thread, where few noticed, because the more appropriate place was auto-locked.
Maybe if the time limit was increased, it could still catch the worst of the targeted necro posts, but affect useful posts less.
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“Necroposting refers to the act of posting in a discussion thread that has been inactive for a long period of time, often several months or even years. This revives the thread, bringing it back to the top of a forum or subreddit, even though the conversation may no longer be relevant or active. Many online communities discourage necroposting to keep discussions timely and focused on current topics.”
(Thanks chatgpt)
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Seems fine to me.
Sure a new topic that may go over an old issue, which may add to the number of topics but if there has been no answer for six months then it seems a pretty dead topic.
And if another user has a similar problem it seems more easy to address in a new topic than adding to an older version and the new OP will get more focused attention.
The new OP can always refer to and or quote the older posts it sees as relevant. Closed posts are still available to be read, quoted and linked to.
Okay. Thanks for your explanations about the necroposting.
You said “the conversation ‘may’ no longer be relevant or active”. So, you know that there may be cases that an added comment is relevant to the thread.
So how about the case of topic-specific threads like the following threads? In my understanding, these threads exist to chat for a specific topic rather than solve an issue. Especially in the first case of the “List of company or individually driven projects”, the thread’s first comment (wiki) has been updated silently constantly while additional comments are not added if someone doesn’t have a question about the topic.
If those threads are locked unintentionally, after the 6 months without added comments that is a problematic, isn’t it?
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There’s
and
So topics can continue in that manner and new ones can be linked older ones the just many topics have links, so old ones can link to new ones.
I started using a Chrome plugin that allows me to ‘fix’ UI stuff on websites I’m using.
This is how that image looks in my browser.
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Trouble is that this time is very hard to define and, IME, can be very long.
I haven’t lurked in this particular forum for very long but it’s quite common in Github issue trackers for issues to lie dormant for many years and at some point someone “necro bumps” it with a new bit of info or even just brings the attention back again and it actually gets fixed.
Sometimes resolved issues also re-appear many years after they’ve been thought to have been fixed. I could see a case for not necro bumping those however.
In any case, I don’t really see a need for it to be forbidden, especially not for such small time frames such as 6 months.
I think there is a point where you can be reasonably sure that a discussion is not relevant anymore in tech (especially software) but even that would be on the order of a decade. We absolutely don’t care about how to index arrays in algol 68 anymore but it wouldn’t be first time someone fixes a bug that’s been open for a decade+ (looking at you Mozilla).
With hardware, I think many things are likely to stay relevant for even longer, especially given that we hopefully will be using our pieces of hardware for a fair bit longer than usual ;).
Given that the worst thing to happen is a slight annoyance of someone bringing irrelevant info to an old thread (which, on Discourse, can be dealt with quite nicely I might add), I think auto-closing threads does more harm than good.
Oh look at you ChatGPT, confidently being wrong…
(Reddit posts can’t be bumped.)
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Thank you all for sharing your feedback about this, this is very valuable. We can adjust the timeframe or remove this function from certain categories 
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I believe that leaving at least some sections such as Creators and Developers, Framework 13, and Framework 16 without time limits or longer time limits could be a more flexible approach to this.
Community Market and Community Support seem like two areas where if there have not been any responses in 6 months, it likely means either the author resolved the issue or sold the item.
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That makes sense, we have received the same feedback from our community developers and removed this from the creators&developers category.
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What about issues (Community Support) that find their solution more than one year later?
Does not seem all that uncommon in the world of open source.
(And also in the realm of hardware development when the schedule is already overloaded.)
Is the solution to just create a new topic and link to the old one at the beginning?
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You mean if the OP finds the solution more than 6 months later? Or someone else comes up with a possible solution.
I don’t think OP would find a solution more than a year later and would want to go back to the original thread to update it. If that happens, we should be able to assist them if they reach out to the moderation team.
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I also vote against the 6-month default closure. It just adds to the confusion of this chaotic type of forum. (I much prefer old-fashioned phpBB forums, like Linux Mint’s. The structure and overview there fits my orderly brain better than long, refreshing pages that are difficult to search with the “search in page” function of browsers, just to name one factor.)
In my experience it just leads to a lot of quoting and rehashing of previously discussed options, explanations and suggestions.
There are people here – I assume I’m not the only one – who have very little time to browse the forums. And even less time to find time to dedicate to hunting down solutions to problems they may have. 6 months is not very long in those circumstances.
I bought a Framework laptop because I believe in the premise of repairable electronics; I didn’t need a new hobby, i.e. trying to keep up and filter out what’s important on this forum.
I find it actually incredibly hard to not miss important things like when firmware updates are issued, or tools, like the tuned for battery management. I attempted to set up an alert for the Optimizing battery life under Ubuntu page, for instance, but my tracker service (followthatpage.com) gets blocked.
[I have a 13", 13th gen intel, running Linux Mint 21.3.]
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Well, one of our community members has kindly given us the perfect example of why we need a rule like this!
Most of those threads are more than three years old. Now all four of them are at the top again, and for what?
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I honestly want our forums to be less chaotic and much easier to navigate. Not everyone has hours to find what they’re looking for, and I agree with you on that. We’ve been implementing some changes to make searching and filtering easier. Right now, we have device tags and distro tags, which means you can filter all Framework Laptop 13 - Intel 13th Gen threads under the Framework Laptop 13 and Community Support categories, or filter all Linux Mint distro threads under the Linux subcategory. We’re on the same page—finding what you need should be simpler.
However, I don’t see how this new change is going to prevent that.
Our end goal is to eliminate duplicate threads. If multiple community members are facing the same issue, it should be discussed in one thread instead of having a new thread created by each member. This way, the thread remains active until a solution is found, and other members facing the same issue in the future won’t have to sift through multiple threads to get help or necropost in 3-year-old threads.
I hope this makes sense.
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The topic timer only locks replies, so wiki posts can still be edited by anyone with trust level 1 or greater. Either way though, forums (especially Discourse forums) are not especially well-suited for long-lasting wiki-style posts. I’d encourage you to contribute to Framewiki, the unofficial Framework Wiki (disclaimer: I am the founder of Framewiki) which is purpose-specific and easier to navigate when looking for evergreen information. See Framewiki:Contributing
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I think the whole closing posts automatically thing makes searching harder, like right now you can search for a specific issue and find at most 3 posts about it, but with the automatic closing you could potentially get 10 times more matches, and it will get worse over time
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