PC Time for a forum purge

Sydious

Sydious

New member
Look the forum has basically been dead for months. Yet I still come here multiple times daily to check the threads. Most of the time is just the same ole same ole. But once in a while there is "a new thread" up and I get all excited. Then I click on it, get all confused, then realize it's some asshat that necroed a post fromyears ago. Starting to piss me off at this point.

 
i do agree guppy but sydious is right the devs should clean out the forum i imagine it wouldnt take long to do :)
Click to expand...
Actually, it's not nearly as easy as you would think. I mean, you could set up auto-pruning. That's a feature that is rarely used though, as it has a tendency to cause issues. The alternative is manually going through and closing all of the topics. I tried this once. It wasn't fun. And you would have to have someone continuously going through and doing that.

Neither of these things are done on the majority of forums out there. It's expected that you take a look at the thread you are going to post in. If it's from more than 30 days ago, you should think twice about whether or not you really need to be posting in it. When you're dredging up a thread from 4 or 5 years ago, it's just plain stupidity. Or maybe laziness. Or maybe just not taking the 3 seconds to pay attention to what you are doing. (That last looks a lot like the first two though.)

Really, the responsibility is on the poster. It's expected that you are familiar with basic forum etiquette when you visit a forum, and consider participating. The problem is that most people born in the last 20-30 years don't give a crap about educating themselves on basic etiquette or even simple manners. It's a very sad vision of how our society is progressing.

 
Personally, I rely on those "hats" to resurrect old threads just to get them closed. Its actually quite funny when I start reading and thinking to myself, "Is that a thing anymore?", only to realize I've been fooled by a very old thread. I get a chuckle out of it every time. :D

 
I don't see the point of deleting threads... 1, if they aren't used, they go away anyway farther and farther back in pages, 2, if you DO start deleting threads, you're going to run into database issues at some point... there are just too many records, and too many links to those records... forum softwares are not designed for it. Something will break. 3, if for some reason you do want to restore something, it could very well mean the forum comes down for several hours, like what happened when Roland deleted a certain user who happened to have a lot of posts, and then restored him.

- - - Updated - - -

Oh, and 4, what Nitnoid said. :)

...it's sometimes funny to get riled up about a subject then realize... oh ♥♥♥♥, that's from alpha 7.

 
...it's sometimes funny to get riled up about a subject then realize... oh ♥♥♥♥, that's from alpha 7.
Click to expand...
Man I hate to disagree with Guppy, love this dude. But honestly he is right. It can be funny the first 50 times. But when the forum is stagnant and that is the only threads that pop up it gets... annoying.

 
Well, it helps that I long ago gave up coming to the forum for information; I honestly don't know what I'd feel if I had to depend on the forum for actual info. :)

 
I had been linking ppl to my stutter related thread for over 3 years... saved me from having to explain it in detail in literally hundreds of new threads. Here's hoping A17 will fix most or all of them though so I can finally put that thread to rest. But if old topics were deleted, then issues like this would arise too. So there's other less obvious reasons not to do it too.

But I don't really see any issue in implementing a script that auto locks threads older than a year.

 
The forum has not been dead for months. It is as much a historic record as it is anything else so what would be the point in deleting anything? If anything, archive the forums once we go to beta and then again when they go live. But never delete.

 
There are legitimate reasons to reply to an old thread in my view. Maybe you just got a crash log for a rare, unresolved bug. Maybe you see how someone’s technical writeup for implementing boats from 2013 would mesh perfectly with an idea you just had. Maybe you just want to thank a content creator for their old video or mod you just enjoyed.

The important criteria are A) Is the content of the thread still relevant today? And B) Do you have something to add? Most threads probably don’t meet A), but if we lock all old threads, we’ll throw out the good with the bad. The bad includes multiple threads on the same topic, which is disorganized, and collectively forgetting important information simply because it’s old and gets buried.

And for what? Because we’re insecure about the forum feeling ‘dead’? I don’t think so. The best outcome would be for everyone to think about whether they’re gravedigging and what makes that bad before they post. Failing that, I don’t see the problem with reporting gravedigging to the moderators case by case.

 
I think you could lock threads with no new posts in the last 30 days and be fine. The info is still there and searchable, you can link to it, and it doesn't risk any errors from missing records in the database.

This should be something simple to implement as a scheduled database task, even if the forum code doesn't support it.

 
But why bother; it'd be easier to lock them if they crop up again as necro'd threads than proactively doing it ahead of time.

 
Maybe it could be like when a new alpha is released....everyone start again at day 1....zero posts, no rep, etc.

Just kidding Roland....stay away from my stats... :mad-new:

 
Maybe it could be like when a new alpha is released....everyone start again at day 1....zero posts, no rep, etc.


Just kidding Roland....stay away from my stats... :mad-new:
Click to expand...
Oh man, just imagine the forum as Guppy gets his post count back up....

 
I tried to play the other day for the first time in.. I dunno. A couple of Alphas I think. It was pretty good until I remembered the click and hold to move things in your inventory. Time to dredge up an old thread and start complaining methinks.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top