Should we be allowed to resurrect years-old threads?

It would also be nice to print a banner at the top, to save readers from puzzling over the first postā€™s question before seeing the date. (Could even be on all old posts, not only resurrected ones.)

For the most part, I think it is just new users that do this (perhaps even more so those unfamiliar with forums in general). I donā€™t think locking is really a great way to go about this, but I agree that a message would be very useful as a nudge.

ā€œAre you aware that this post is over 2 years old, which is equal to 100 Julian years?ā€

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That warning already appears.

Iā€™ve tried to get the Discourse software to support putting a banner across old threads, but I got a negative reaction from the devs there about that.

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Ha! Evidence that nudges arenā€™t perfect. Not sure much more is needed, makes it even more likely that my first point is correct (that the worst offenders are probably not familiar with basic internet forum etiquette). Nothing terribly wrong with that, but maybe it would be a good policy to just steer them to make a new topic rather than continue any discussion in the existing old thread (which I think is sometimes informally done anyway).

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On a related question, do you think that Discourse provides any feature to automatically tag new discussions with the current Julia release? That could help with ranking search results, and perhaps also help with avoiding resurrection of old discussions.

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I think in some forums the policy is to never have more than one thread on a given topic.

I have defiantely seen people who act like creating a new thread (or new issue on github for that matter) has much greater cost than adding a comment to an existing one ā€“ even if it pulls a dead thread in a new direction

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How about an option for users to automatically ā€œunfollowā€ threads when they have been inactive for a few months? Users with a strong dislike of necroposting would then no longer be bothered, while others can continue the discussion should they feel like it.

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Is it possible to link this to trust level, so that you have to be ā€œBasicā€ or maybe ā€œMemberā€ to open old threads?

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As a beginner, I see the Julia discourse posts as more than just ā€œconversationsā€, but primarily as repositories of knowledge and solutions. I see many valid reasons for their resurrection including: (i) the code is not working on a new version of Julia or on a different operating system; (ii) the solution was well understood by the experts but not by the beginners who need additional explanations; (iii) There is always a different angle of attack on a problem or related questions that might not have been discussed. Thank you.

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I hate when some forums (such as Reddit) automatically close threads with unanswered or even wrong answers. You find them and want to reply but itā€™s impossible.

As others have pointed out, many times the thread is still valid, and creating a new one with the same content is very inefficient.

Maybe we just need to tag the thread with the affected Julia versions and packages. That way we wonā€™t be reading a Julia v0.6 threads if we need to solve a problem related with v1.5.

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I agree with @mbauman, @rafael.guerra and @Juan that there are often legitimate reasons for adding posts to old threads. Absolute solutions, like automatic locking or unsubscribing participants, fail to serve these valid use cases, for little benefit (eliminating a very small amount of thread ressurrection that currently happens).

I think the ā€œRevive this topic?ā€ notice is the right way to address this problem, and for all we know (and countering @tbeasonā€™s suggestion), the fact that we do have a small amount of thread revival may well be evidence that the nudge works well ā€” though I concede, it isnā€™t 100.00% perfect. :slight_smile:

If anything, Iā€™d suggest tweaking that notice to add that, in addition to notifying a lot of people, reviving an old thread that has dozens of posts is more problematic (as it may require a lot of context-gathering) than an old one that has only a few. But thatā€™s just my 2Ā¢. :wink:

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People resurrect old topics only sporadically on this forum, so perhaps the warning is sufficient. No system is 100% perfect, and a little noise is OK to deal with occasionally as long as it is not overwhelming.

So I would just leave the setup as it is now.

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It could be done in such a way that only those who have posted at least 5 times could reply to old threads.
They will likely know the rules and only resurrect if they have good reasons.

And I still think the best option is to tag each thread with the related version (or range of versions) of Julia/packages, or tag it as generic.

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I have resurrected old posts twice now. They were directly related to the problem I had and yet the issue had not been fully resolved.

I have been on this discourse forum for over a year now.

I post on these ā€œoldā€ threads because I feel there is a better chance of someone helping address my problem. After all all people on the thread were genuinely interested in the problem and likely have more experience than I, to help resolve the issue.

Time should not be the factor, but whether the issue is solved as @rafael.guerra points out . Why start a new thread when an old one that is exactly on the same issue remains unresolved? At least this is not how I organize my notes.

Whenever I get reminders from posts that I am no longer interested in, I simply unsubscribe from that line of conversation.

A reminder like ā€œThis thread has been inactive for X years. Reviving this thread may not ā€¦ā€ and for ā€¦ fill in with why one would be against reviving old threadsā€“of which I donā€™t see why unless subject matter is very different.

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good point.
I think its a bit of a compounding thing.
Its when someone post on a old thread something that is not closely related to the topic of that thread that is is problem.

I think there is kind of trade-off surface.
The older the thread, the more ontopic a new post should be to resurect it.

but a lot of threads donā€™t have clear topics, and so nothing is surficently on topic to make it good ro resuract them.
and a reason they donā€™t have clear topics is because when they are still fresh it is ok to post stuff not too closely related.


Though the other problem is that things might have ceased to be relevent.
While thigns might look similar other things have changed in the between time rending a lot of the older commentry misleading

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I kind of liked my own suggestion of tying this to trust levels, to avoid typical ā€˜drive-byā€™ resurrection of ancient threads that is sometimes done by people who apparently sign up just for that. Not sure if itā€™s possible.

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More important than forbidding the restarting of old threads is stimulate the person that asks the question to click on the ā€œSolutionā€, if there is one. Maybe a reminder after some time of inactivity? It is clear to me that one can sometimes find an old related thread, but no post is marked as a solution (many times justifiably).

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Apologies for reviving this old thread.

:rofl:

I have been guilty of reviving several old threads recently. My reasoning was basically that the top search hits for a particular question leads to stale/deprecated answers on discourse and my intention/hope was that the answers would be updated and made useful again.

However, not everyone is happy about this.

Having stale answers that are a top search hit is not great IMHO: it takes one click and a fair amount of scrolling, throwing code into the REPL, attempting to understand the error messages, attempting to fix it, before realizing it was a ā€œfalse positiveā€ and moving on.

I could certainly start a new question, but there are downsides to that too.

The new question would not be competing fairly for the search enginesā€™ attention. By the time it reaches the top five or ten hits, it might have become stale again. Meanwhile the stale threads will still attract attention.

So I start that new question and the answer is that the method has been renamed foo instead of Foo or simply that it has now been moved to the Bar package. I say thank you and feel a little foolish. In retrospect would such an answer not have been better at the end of the older thread? :cold_sweat:

This problem does not arise with Python, R, C++, Javascript, because pretty much every question an inexperienced user may have has some updated answer on stackoverflow and is a top search hit. There is no need to visit the Python or R ā€œdiscourseā€ for simple, common questions.

I understand discourse is not stackoverflow, but then it does have a ā€œsolutionā€ check feature. Itā€™s a great way for the OP to thank a particular answerer, but is it not also intended to serve as a guide for future visitors of the thread? Unfortunately having stale/useless answers defeats the purpose.

Would it violate the communityā€™s etiquette to flag a question with a ā€œanswer incorrect/outdated, suggest to close itā€?

Should I always start new questions and let stale threads be stale? :thinking:

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I think that it is implicitly assumed that readers would understand that the information in a topic years old may be out of date. Also, AFAIK Discourseā€™s search feature factors in the age of the discussion, so this may be a problem with search engines only.

It is hard to give a general rule about when to revive old topics, and occasionally it can be helpful, so it is allowed, just use your own judgement about it. Most cases it is better to start a new topic.

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I would say that most of the time it is better to start a new topic, and if appropriate provide a link to the old thread.

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