From my observation year(s)-old threads suddenly getting reactivated by some random (and hardly ever meaningful) post seems to be happening rather frequently as of lately.
Might well be due to new users attracted on the 2.8-wave. Anyway I personally feel it’s becoming somewhat tiresome.
Maybe the concept of auto-closing threads after a certain period of inactivity should be reconsidered.
And yes, I’m well aware, I could ironically have ripped a thread about exactly this from 2012 out of it’s shallow grave.
@bartv would probably be a better person to reply to this with more information, but this idea has come up in the past. We do auto-close threads in some categories (like the ones in #jobs) and before the migration, we had a policy of auto-closing all threads that were (I think) greater than 1 year old. Of course, we often got requests from people who wanted to have their old threads re-opened because they started working their project anew.
Personally, I’m not all that bothered/distracted by these old threads that periodically pop up, but I can see how it may be an annoyance for some folks.
We can certainly do this, and use different policies per category if we want. However, it might be good to understand first why this is an issue - if replies are on-topic, what’s the problem?
I don’t like that idea at all. Since i allways look at the creation dates first, this is hardly a problem. They did this on CGTalk and close the threads after one year, which was really annoying. Let’s say someone does a search on a subject, found it and had a question. Then he has to open a new thread and point to the old thread as reference. At that point it gets comlicated and members are less willing to help.
On the other hand, i rather have the exact creation dates on each posts. Not a fan of those 1h, 1d, 1w type of thingy.
I think it s better not to close old threads.
The worst thing that can happen is that someone answers an old question and the original asker does not need the information anymore.
It might still be interesting for other people, though.
But if you close the thread nobody can ask anything in the thread anymore. If people have a related question it can be useful to build up on an existing thread.
