How to respond to necroposts by newcomers?

[sylvaticus]

While I do not necessarily agree on the opportunity to revive the topic with the insights expressed of this comment, it is also true that, if the text hasn’t changed compared to those received on my email notification, the post wasn’t so much inappropriate/off-topic to deserve to be hidden.
I don’t want this forum to become another SO site full of people ready to close/hide perceived low-quality contributions…

[greatpet]

If a new user’s only two posts consist of one reviving a two-year old thread and another one reviving a seven-month old thread, I guess the moderators may not be very happy and could suspect the poster to be a bot of some kind. But I agree that the post itself is not spam.

[sylvaticus]

well, my opinion is that it would be better to educate the new user on the fact that reviving old posts should be done only when there are really good reasons, new insights, solution to unsolved questions… but we are going OT ourselves now…

[gdalle]

I usually delete and block the user. Typically these newcomers have spent less time reading on the forum than it would take to catch up on the discussion, so I suspect either bot or ChatGPT. I admit there might be false positives.

[heliosdrm]

Necro-post prevention

I consistently see posts added to threads that can be 6-months to years old. It seems to me that the best way to pick up and out-of-date/old thread would be to start a new thread with a link to the old discussion followed by the “new” content. Would it be possible for the discourse forum to do that automatically? If not, I would prefer closing topics after a year with no ability to necro-post to them at all.

Just add that I rather agree @baggepinnen’s take on this topic.

[rafael.guerra]

Linking yet another thread on necro-posting.

[savq]

The rust discourse has a bot that closes a thread after 90 days without activity. I think that’s a very reasonable policy.

[tecosaur]

I do think it’s reasonable to have long-running threads in Package Announcements where minor updates are periodically given in an old thread. I wouldn’t advocate for a hard 90 day rule site-wide.

[GunnarFarneback]

I don’t think necroposting was the main issue here. I saw a total of three messages from two new users in two threads and all taken together, to me it looked more like a drive-by marketing campaign than a good-faith attempt to engage in conversation.

[oscarvdvelde]

I believe that the forum platform itself somewhat encourages necroposting, because when you start typing a new thread, it suggests all previous threads with those keywords, and it is discouraged to post new threads when the topic has already been discussed before. Perhaps it just needs to be clarified better when it is fine to start a new thread.
Also, I wouldn’t mind if a banner appears on top of old threads that receive necro posts. That way you can save yourself the time realizing there is actually no discussion being held currently. Or just lock threads after a going a year without comments?