It looks to me like there are two possible issues with posting to an old thread. The first is that somebody might be posting to a thread not understanding that the original thread relates to something out of date and their software is more up to date, so they either won’t get replies, or will get low-quality replies, and will have a bad user experience.
The second, and one that seems to be most important to most people who don’t like reviving old threads, is that people get notified by email about things they no longer consider relevant.
So, as far as I can tell, the best solution would be to add a feature to the software to give people an option to automatically unsubscribe after a period of time that they consider to be their window of relevance for a thread. It would be in their settings and apply globally and it seems like it should probably default to a year on this particular site.
Considering the amount of time humans have spent berating each other for “necro-posting” on forums and reddit I believe this would be an immense boon for humanity and don’t have the slightest clue why anyone expects random internet users to magically know and care to follow etiquette that may or may not be actually written out on the site being used rather than enforce rules technologically. Since some forums do prevent replying to old threads, this has been attempted but, as evidenced by this here thread, the differences of opinion on the window of relevancy seems to have blocked a universal adoption.
Does letting each user decide on their own sound like a reasonable solution, ignoring the technical challenge of building a new feature into the software?
For someone who has been long curious as to why there is so much disrespect toward responses to preserved messages from weeks or months before, this thread has been quite illuminating.
Any thread to which a user has posted is permanently on their watched list and they will get notifications. This is the nature of the forum and AFAIK cannot be changed.
Weeks or months is not the issue.
Reopening threads that have been necro for Years, are related to EOL release versions, and solved threads are the issue.
It only takes a bit of common sense to read the date on the last post, see the solved message on the first post of the thread, and glance at the tags or the content of the first post and understand that your modern OS and apps are much updated from the one that was the subject of the necro thread you are reopening.
I do not wipe out a new issue by closing the thread but instead usually move the new question about the users issue to a new current topic before closing the older thread.
I do extremely dislike when someone only posts their supposedly new solution information on the old necro thread since their info only serves to notify those who otherwise have totally ignored the topic for however long it has been since the last post. That info is usually not relevant any way since they are usually running a much updated version of the OS and whatever apps they are running.
By default if you’ve posted to a thread, you go to “Watching” status and get a notification for everything, but you can change that, even down to “Muted” if you don’t want to receive anything:
@computersavvy, that’s untrue. Discourse provides the option to unsubscribe in a very easily-accessible location. You can ask upstream, at Meta, if you can’t see it:
If that’s too difficult for you to remember, the defaults can be configured:
You should have read the documentation regarding this, before asserting that.
Lastly, regarding the undermentioned:
I have provided two intra-forum examples that counter this.
@endlessefforts, I vehemently agree. Are you willing to submit that, as an FR?
Possibly I should have said by default in my above post.
However, it still remains that by default all who have posted on that thread will be notified – both here in the forum and by email – when a necro thread is reopened.
To avoid that each user who has posted on the topic would have to mark it as unwatched using the methods shown above. Now you are placing the burden on each such user and they would only know to do that after the topic has been reopened. Far from ideal.
@computersavvy, by “by default”, do you refer to a user who has not customised /u/$USER/preferences’s /notifications or /tracking? If so, every new account’s defaults can be modified by the instance administrator[s].
yes
Defaults are defined based on what works best for the majority of users.
Asking a system administrator to change the settings for each individual user would be overwhelming. The admin would have no idea what each user wants changed.
@computersavvy, I agree, but you misunderstand. I meant that although Discourse sets defaults for all new users, they can easily be overridden per-instance.
Upstream doesn’t always apply sane defaults: