How do you feel about necroposting?

[Shawn Gossman]

Necroposting is when a member posts on a thread that hasn't been posted for a long time, usually more than 6 months to a year.

Is this something you allow on your forum or do you discourage it?

If you don't allow it, how do you handle members who do it?

 

[secretprojects]

Absolutely allowed, even encouraged, but that is due to how my forum operates. It is largely topics about a specific and little known aircraft (missile/spacecraft/ship/tank) design, with the primary purpose to gather and reference information from various places on that design - if you have new information to add 10 years later, that's totally valid. So half forum, half wikipedia.

I can see this is a special use case though. Ephemeral discussions that are years old probably shouldn't be revived.

 

[Elseb]

I'm not particularly fond of it but if its a relevant post, I wouldn't say anything. He'll, I'm just happy for the posts haha.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Absolutely allowed, even encouraged, but that is due to how my forum operates. It is largely topics about a specific and little known aircraft (missile/spacecraft/ship/tank) design, with the primary purpose to gather and reference information from various places on that design - if you have new information to add 10 years later, that's totally valid. So half forum, half wikipedia.

I can see this is a special use case though. Ephemeral discussions that are years old probably shouldn't be revived.

I'm with you on this one.

I typically don't have any issue with necroposting as long as they are adding something to it.

If it's spam or gibberish, then something needs to happen.

 

[Tracy]

It happens... why get butt-hurt over it. Someone may be new to the site, see a post that they have valid input on (that hasn't been addressed) and posts to that thread. Exactly who/what does it hurt? Their input may bring a new view to the thread that was not considered before.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

It happens... why get butt-hurt over it. Someone may be new to the site, see a post that they have valid input on (that hasn't been addressed) and posts to that thread. Exactly who/what does it hurt? Their input may bring a new view to the thread that was not considered before.

I say if you don't like members to necropost, then setup controls to lock old posts. There should be an "engineering control" to mitigate it.

But I'm with you @Tracy I'm not against it as it could bring about more discussion and something unique to the conversation.

I see it happen all the time on TAZ, FP and other forums and it 99.999% turns out fine

 

[PGen98]

I used to be dead set against it, because I used to help run an extremely large gaming forum and necro-posts were typically deliberate and spammy, which got in the way of the very lively discussions happening within the forums. Now, though, any activity is good activity so long as it contributes towards the topic at hand. I wouldn't bump something that's years old unless it was your own topic to provide an update or something to that effect, but it's not something that should be discouraged for most cases these days.