Moderation Question: "gravedigging"

[mali]

^ Valid points My main problem are the discussions that circle around gravedigging when someone bumps an older thread. The discussion in this thread shows that the situation is not so clear what that three months rule really means. The MODs will be able to decide if a bump is ok or not and nobody needs to advise people not to bump threads older than three months in the future. The rule won't be changed but the interpretation shifts a little towards letting bumps pass.

I'm basically just planning ahead for a time when these boards are more active, because people finally got their Pandoras. We should decide what to do then already today. The next point that needs to be discussed is how to reduce fragmentation and minor gravedigging is already a small part of this future topic.

 

[TitanUranus]

I think I already answered this replying to a post in a topic I created. Someone felt obliged to appologise for gravedigging and also to condemn a little immature off topic banter, I quote myself...

Welcome trix, I thought this thread was deceased. I don't think resurrecting a pandora thread is really gravedigging though. Since so many people have yet to recieve their pandora it's quite possible there is nothing they can add till they have one, and there's no point opening a new topic when one exists that does the job brilliantly - as this most wonderful topic surely does.

Finally, maturity is over rated. After all, if we all behaved like sensible and respectful people this topic would be 3 posts long and burried deeper than memories of catholic sunday school. So in the interest of keeping this topic alive can I just say every one is a dick... discuss.

That's prety much how I feel about it. Perhaps be could get a couple of people to volunteer to resurrect long forgotten topics that might be of interest to the general community today, maybe call them "Burke" and "Hare" or something. I for one hardly ever look past the first page to see what's recently been posted and I'm sure I'm missing a lot of interesting stuff that could easily be updated with new information.

 

[may88]

As long as the topic is still valid, i believe it is better to continue using it than to open a new one.

This but with a capital I.

 

[God Ginrai]

I appear to be somewhat late to the discussion, but here goes.

The main issue about gravedigging is that even if an important question/issue is raised, several pages of posts comes before that. For someone who has never seen the topic before, even if they're aware of the issue, it can take a few minutes before you notice the ancient timestamps, and even then it can be a hassle to find where the new, relevant discussion begins. Grench was complaining about fragmentation by allowing multiple topics about one subject, but personally I think it's a lot easier to look through multiple threads than to go through one massive 50 page thread just to find the one post where someone said "SDXC works". If there are 5 topics, 4 called "Does SDXC work" and one called "SDXC works", I can immediately check the latter and get relevant info without slogging through 100 "I'd also like to know this" posts. Also, as WizardStan says, some people will only go through the first page of a "Wifi Issue" thread, and then go for the reply button, without seeing the post 3 pages later that says it's been fixed.

Another point, is that as even this thread has demonstrated, threads in this forum tend to derail at their end of life, as well as being strewn with offtopic posts, making reading through them even harder.

I think the correct response should be to solve the actual problem, people thinking the information is new. You could edit the original post to indicate that the topic is old, and perhaps link to the start of the new discussion. Alternatively, you could split the topic, with a link to the old one (I think you've done this before?).
Another idea would be to lock (not delete) topics older than a year, or whatever, automatically. This means old threads cannot be gravedug, and also adds a warning of sorts to users that the post is old.

I agree with most of what Aninhumer is saying.

It's best to keep discussions shorter so that people new to the thread are not overwhelmed by pages of posts, and that's what allowing a thread to die achieves. I can't tell you how angry it makes me to see someone ask a question in a topic that has already been answered simply because they were too lazy to read through the topic. And the higher the page count, the more likely they are to do that. A user could still make a post relevant to a dead topic by making a new topic that links to the old topic for reference. That way, they can summarize the main points of the topic without making people read pages of dialogue. Also, people can still read that dialogue if they so choose.

-God Ginrai

 

[jdbye]

It depends on the relevance of the new post to the topic, if it's a topic about someone having a problem it would be better for someone else with the same problem to gravedig, rather than post a new topic IMO. If the topic itself is pretty useless then gravedigging won't make it any more useful. If the topic is still relevant and the post is relevant to the topic then gravedigging should be OK.

 

[mali]

We had at least one successfully non-flamed useless gravedig which turned out positive in the end. It was worth it to discuss this so far methinks