An Admin Rant

[Silver]

Thank you, Brian37, but - again - this isn’t about the merits of necroposting.

Boru

The original post of this thread disagrees, unless you want to edit and remove all mention of *le gasp* necroposting.

[arewethereyet]

At least we have found something worthwhile to debate.

A nearly year old thread about Facebook being revived is the most important thing we will discuss today.

[Silver]

You're welcome.

[Spongebob]

Wow, what a way to make someone feel welcome.  Open-mindedness is obviously not a virtue here.

We also have rules against spam, sock accounts, trolling, hate speech, etc. Whether other forums have these rules is completely immaterial to what goes on here, so it’s rather pointless to bring them up. 

While no one is required to like AF rules (I object to some of them myself), we’re all required to follow them.

Boru

Please direct me to where I said I or anyone else should not follow your rules?  I believe you'll be looking a long, long time.  I'll wait...

And yes, other forums I've been on all prohibited all those other things you mentioned, and I can clearly see the reasons for it.  However, I am not aware of any reasons for prohibiting "necroposting", and I merely asked why it's prohibited.  So, by way of inductive reasoning, I presume asking a valid question is also prohibited?

---

BTW, I just re-read the rules section.  And I have yet another question:

Rule #22 Egregious or disruptive necroposting is not allowed.

Clearly, it doesn't say all necroposting is prohibited.  What is the definition of "egregious or disruptive"?

[Angrboda]

I believe the point in mentioning other forums is to suggest alternative ways of administering the forum that seem to work elsewhere.

And I believe that's all I'll say given the attitudes of some here.

[Spongebob]

I believe the point in mentioning other forums is to suggest alternative ways of administering the forum that seem to work elsewhere.

And I believe that's all I'll say given the attitudes of some here.

For the most part, yes.  It seemed pretty obvious to me.  I hadn't seen it as an issue before, but apparently here it practically drives people nuts.  My first reaction was, why is that?  I don't feel that curiosity itself is a justification for scorn.

For the record, I was an admin on that forum and all the admins decided to close a number of stale threads mainly because spammers kept posting on them.  I don't remember anyone getting their panties in a wad just because an old thread was revived by someone who wanted to discuss the topic.

[HappySkeptic]

30 days can be a bit short for the necroposting rule - I like the idea of 60 days.

The reason for it is simple - an abandoned thread no longer has the attention of the OP, and is likely to spin out of control or be hijacked for another purpose.

Threads are best when they are topical and kept on-topic. If you want to post on an old idea, start your own thread. No-one is going to reply to your post of their post from 2 years ago.

[Huggy Bear]

30 days can be a bit short for the necroposting rule - I like the idea of 60 days.

The reason for it is simple - an abandoned thread no longer has the attention of the OP, and is likely to spin out of control or be hijacked for another purpose.

Threads are best when they are topical and kept on-topic. If you want to post on an old idea, start your own thread. No-one is going to reply to your post of their post from 2 years ago.

I feel there are legit reasons to revive a thread that's a year or two old, for example in a thread about the tower of Babel I was trying to explain how the people that lived in the antediluvian period were technologically advanced and I referenced the great pyramid. Of course as usual, every thought that was hilarious until a peer reviewed paper came out a year or two later, talking about how the 'great' pyramid was able to focus electromagnetic energy.

In that case I feel it's appropriate to update the thread with the new information.

[The Valkyrie]

Okay, I think this "discussion" is getting out of hand.

The simple fact is that there are rules in place that people will disagree with (hell, I disagree with some), but you can't please everyone and if we got rid of all the rules that people disagree with, we wouldn't have any.

And then the place would be chaos. I saw it happen on the old Star Trek.com forums, and it wasn't pretty. Page after page of nothing but spam


Yes, there are other forums that allow necroposting, and that's fine. But those are other forums, not this one.

Many of the rules are in place from before most of the current staff were in place. And we have changed rules, this one included.

So please, even if you disagree with them, abide by the rules.

[vulcanlogician]

I don't think this thread was intended to make me feel like a douchebag. But that's what happened anyway.