It's that time again; another discussion on thread Necromancy, since the Gods themselves feel the need to be silent.

On a recent discussion, the concurrence seems to be: Do not lock the old threads.

Fine. All I ask of GOG then, is that it be made impossible for even the most foolhardy fool to accidentally post in an old thread.

Here is a wishlist entry pertaining to exactly that: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/warnalert_user_of_incredibly_old_thread_before_posting

As mentioned on the other topic, various "community list" based get updated (but not always weekly / monthly) and it makes zero sense to arbitrarily lock people from editing their own posts based on some arbitrary timeline. One simple but effective compromise is like TechPowerUp forums where if you try and post to an old topic, you'll see a red warning banner saying "This thread is x months old. It is very likely that it does not need any further discussion and thus bumping it serves no purpose. If you feel it is necessary to make a new reply, you can still do so though." which then requires checking the checkbox to continue. Best of both worlds - people are discouraged from randomly necroing anything whilst others can still update posts / tracker lists, and spam-bots are usually also auto-blocked.

And that, as pictured, is more or less what I'm suggesting.

I think this whole "threads necromancy" stuff is stupid.

There is nothing wrong with posting in old threads instead of starting new ones with the exact same goal (same question, same discussion, etc.). There is no such thing as forum necromancy, only people (including moderators) who do not understand how forums work.

Indeed. +1
Zero point in a warning too.

You can use the Barefoot Essentials script to warn you about how old was the last post.

Imo, what might be helpful is to color code the top banner of posts, to more clearly indicate how old they are. E.g.:

post < 6 months - leave it white
post < 1 year - yellow
post < 2 years - orange
post > 2 years - red

It's happened to me in the past, that someone has posted in an old thread, and I haven't realized most of the other posts are several years old.

Although, lets be honest, we all know the chances of GOG making meaningful changes to the forum at this point are pretty much zero ...

And indeed, I do have that. It isn't universally applicable to all users; not everyone is willing or able to install userscripts. This would save the trouble.

I wouldn't care about first post/thread start. Only "age since last post". And longer gaps should keep a sticky banner in between.

Discourse has this feature. Here's an example in the last screen shot on the page:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/time-calculation-since-last-post-is-not-correct-possibly-not-using-year-in-calculation/286715/4

Notice the "2 years later". And an earlier screen shot has a "1 month later".

Note: I personally don't like discourse because of its lazy load and how it breaks "ctrl-f" to find in browser. But it does have a lot of otherwise great features.

The foolhardy fools that systematically post irrelevant musings in active threads, specially in release/editorial active threads, bother me significantly more than the two times a year someone not paying attention inadvertently bumps an old thread.

Anyway, I'm sure gog is going to get right on it, if there's one thing gog folk are known for is their enthusiasm for fiddling with ancient, fiddly, uncooperative code in order to introduce luxury forum features.

Nah, i'm good.

Why not? I'm not even asking for threads to be locked after 6 months. Just to display something obvious such as, "The last post in this thread was 6 months ago, are you sure you have something pertinent to add?"

My mistake...usually you seem to advocate only for locking said threads, so I assumed your wishlist item was similar. Voted.

I decided to relent on that. For now.

That would be the battle of Coriana VI in 2261, although some people think it should be considered to have begun with Babylon 5 going operational in 2256...

...oh...

you said thread age. My bad. Nevermind.