I realize that the forums are new and this is not yet an issue, but I wonder what the forum etiquette is on necroing old threads as it used to come up a lot.
In the case of an out of date thread that is missing new game changes, it makes sense to create a new thread rather than necro an old one. In this case, necroing the old thread is frowned upon.
For a topic that is no longer in the limelight, it is more of a gray issue. Is there a time cutoff where it is better to post in an old thread rather than create a new one, assuming that there are no other “current” thread existing on the subject?
Well considering this new forum does not appear to have dates on threads and the fact you can scroll forever, I suspect this will be a recurring issue. Does not bother me at all BTW.
Edit: Ok they do have a time stamp on minutes/hours/days etc. Whoever said I was observant was asleep.
The act of posting simply to bump a thread is considered spamming. This also includes bumping old threads for no reason (also called “necroing”). - Posting Guidelines
I am not sure what they will do about it, it was an issue on the old forum.
Bumping threads is a different issue than necroing. Typically, bumping refers to your own thread/posts while necroing is typically someone else’s.
@Atomfurz
There have been 210 topics created this week of which I am responsible for 3. For every topic that I created since the new forum started, I have viewed ~64 others according to Blizzard’s statistics. For comparison, you have created 1 topic and viewed 59.
While it’s a bit of an annoyance, this forum does have one feature that does help spot a necro. If you check out this post, you’ll notice that just above it is a line that separates it from the previous post and states “1 month later”. This isn’t a cure-all, but if you train yourself to spot these in a thread it can greatly reduce the chance of replying to someone that has necro’d a thread.
And no, I’m not fully 100% bulletproof on spotting these, so I don’t expect any of you to be either. It’s just an extra tool we can use to spot a necro and avoid repsonding to it unless absolutely necessary.
The actual act of necroing is still frowned upon by Blizzard though, and they still have the option to lock threads that have been necro’d just like they did on the old forum. And yes, they can still infract an account for repeatedly necroing threads on purpose.
Would still say threads over 30d old should be locked, while those that push a reply after 14d should be kept an eye on for repeat offenses. Random low post google replies aside, I think we regulars all know who’s being referenced with various necros, too.
In the old forum, I think many of the necros were unintentional as it tended to be low post counter users who used the search function and hit reply to the top topic (without realizing that it was sorted by “relevance” rather than date if I recall correctly.)
One of the benefits of the new forum is also that scrollbar you see on the right of the main thread window. You can see the originating date at the top of the scrollbar. The downside is that if it falls within a certain range between the current date and one year ago, like say, Nov. 18th, 2018 vs. the current date of Aug. 11th, 2019, it might show as “Nov [date]”, but will omit the actual year. IMO it should always show the year as well as the day and month on that scrollbar. That’s something I plan on bringing up with the Discourse devs as they’re the ones that need to implement that change before it can be rolled out to Blizzard.
Back on old forums I found it funny that mods were closing some of very old threads to prevent necroing but actually by doing it they brought those threads to the first page.
Your post is like the kids in the back seat asking, “Are we there yet?”
or
Someone right now asking a Season 19 or 20 question when we are still in Season 17.
I would not worry about necroing posts as you can’t necro a post that is 30 days old.
Necroing is typical of a year or more old.
I’'m sure Meteorblade or MissCheetah will correct me if I’m off a bit in my time constraint.
Even though we can scroll indefinitely I highly doubt that there will be people that will scroll that long. The other problem is that we can even bookmark posts and threads so it makes it easier to necro by going back to our bookmarks in our profile. Let’s hope it doesn’t get any worse than what it was in the older forums.
