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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of spinning of a tangent flamewar: this ties into a wider issue that boggles my mind to this day - the concept of "necroposting" as something negative. People will commonly want to eat you alive if you post a new reply under a stale discussion thread, but that reaction feels really dumb. The old context is useful.

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If the old context is useful, sure. but it often isn't, and that's what causes people to dislike necroposting. But without a specific policy/instance in mind discussing this is a bit moot, since everyone has a different level of reasonableness in mind.

There's at least one forum out there where necroposting is actually valued by the culture. It's considered cool and fun to make a relevant post on a thread that was last updated five years ago. I love that.

Which forum?

For me the reason I see it mostly as something negative is because most necroposts are pointless. They're often only written because the author forgot to check the date and thus didn't realise their comment won't contribute anything useful. Like when a user tells others in a 7 years old, obsolete thread they're wrong because shiny new solution XYZ exists.

but that's just a reasonable response to a specific type of comment, not a general defense of banning necroposts outright.

The reason the term exists is because it's a blanket rule based on the age of the reply, not based on the intent or context.

The blanket rule is because even "good" necroposts tend to encourage bad ones. If I'm on an active forum and I revive some ancient discussion with a useful comment, lots of people will click on the thread and try to argue with the old posts.

The generally recommended alternative is to make a new thread and simply link to the old one so you don't confuse people.

> the author forgot to check the date and thus didn't realise their comment won't contribute anything useful

I have a different view of those in most cases - particularly on large, or publicly accessible, boards. That comment may not contribute anything useful for the people previously involved, but it may very well be useful for everyone else - such as any person that finds the thread through a search engine.

> Like when a user tells others in a 7 years old, obsolete thread they're wrong because shiny new solution XYZ exists.

That's a specific case about one-upping someone much later, but a more generalized case - posting modern solution under unresolved problem thread - is very valuable for people who find the thread looking for a solution. Conversely, blanket ban on "necroposting" discourages accumulation of knowledge on tough problems.

See also: https://xkcd.com/979/

I agree that a blanket ban on necro-posting has the negative consequences you mention. It is commonly discouraged as a heuristic, because necro-posts often have a high time cost to those who were previously involved. First, because by that time they've forgotten the context, and since the new post often does not summarize the entire previous conversation, it forces someone who wants to make sense of it to go back and re-read it to understand that context. In contrast, a new issue is more likely to stand on its own and be easier to process. It can still link to the old issue in order to keep the chain intact. And second, because the new commenter is often wrong that their bug is the same, or has missed some of the context and is just adding duplicate information. Note that both of these apply more to long threads.

I think this suggests two things:

1. There is an opportunity for better tooling. I'm thinking something like those annoying infinite scroll news/blog sites, where you reach the end of the article and it dynamically sticks another one on the page below (& updates the url). Imagine that but with any bug that's been marked as a duplicate (which the bug reporter should be able to do). Now you get the best of both worlds -- a way to view the new post with or without context.

2. Necro-ing would be less problematic if bug tracking were less centralized. More long, support-type bugs between distributors and users, where is preferable to log a new issue than necro an old one; more short summaries of confirmed bugs submitted by maintainers to the upstream repo. GitLab's separation of issues and epics is a good idea here, although their implementation is awkward at best.

> And second, because the new commenter is often wrong that their bug is the same, or has missed some of the context and is just adding duplicate information. Note that both of these apply more to long threads.

That's a good point I haven't considered. Yeah, the consequence of mistakenly starting a new topic under an unrelated old thread is that the new discussion is now miscategorized and harder to find.

> It can still link to the old issue in order to keep the chain intact.

Yes, that would be great. If one could pull off an UI that nudged people to correctly link back to older threads, so that such links were typical, I think it would mostly solve the necropost problem - the etiquette could be changed to "don't necropost; if starting a new thread on a topic that was discussed in the past, ensure your post links back to those old discussions".

(I think I saw a few boards automatically generating a box with "related topics", but IIRC, their method of finding related topics yielded lots of false positives. If improved, this could work too, though I would still prefer explicit links that don't change over time.)

> I'm thinking something like those annoying infinite scroll news/blog sites, where you reach the end of the article and it dynamically sticks another one on the page below (& updates the url).

I personally don't want that. I hate this UI pattern. In particular:

- As implemented on social media platforms, it makes it nearly impossible to find your way back to something you saw a minute ago but scrolled past.

- As implemented on news sites, auto-appended articles are usually not relevant to the one you just finished.

- The URL substitution is particularly annoying - usually, the time I care about the URL is when I read/skim the article to the end, and then decide to share or bookmark it. At that point, the URL will already be changed to point to a different article, and it's easy to miss. And the way these feeds are implemented, if you follow the link to a follow-up article and scroll up, you won't get back the article you actually wanted.

> boggles my mind to this day - the concept of "necroposting" as something negative.

I never understood it either. I mean, as a religion.

What is even sillier, is that as far as web forums are concerned, you have 50% of them which will go mad if you "necropost", and the other 50% which will go mad if you open a new thread when there is already an existing thread on the same topic (even buried), because these have the exact opposite written or unwritten rule. The latter ones love their 800 pages long topics; the former ones forbid you to follow up with a discussion even when it is the exact same topic, if the discussion stopped for a while.

You know what beats that still? I've been using a few boards where people believed in both these things at the same time. So when a topic stalled, it was nigh-impossible to resume it later.

Ah! :)

I've seen something a bit like that: moderators who would come down hard on people who ask a question, both in an old thread or a new one (because the first time they were told not to create new threads or not to necropost so they tried again, following the advice, in the opposite manner), by telling them "why can't you search the fucking forum 2 minutes before digging an old thread / creating a new thread, stupid; this has been answered multiple times: here, here and here; topic locked", and of course none of the links he gives does answer the specific problem the posters had and clearly specified, because the mod didn't spend the said 2 minutes reading the posters' questions and just stupidly copied the first search results in the rush he had to punish the intruders. So, when you hit the same problems as the posters, you are out of luck, because their questions were not answered before, and they will never be.

I have seen this unfortunate behaviour in mailing lists for some Open Source software as well. Gatekeepers with anger issues and too much time on their hand (but not enough to actually answer the question). Sometimes I wish these people realised how hostile they are and unwelcoming to new users and potential contributors, but maybe that’s the point.

The result is ~10 relevant hits when you Google an error message with not a single useful solution.

Getting redirected to post on a locked thread where that's not allowed... I propose to call this the Catch-302.

Agree for intelligent discourse about a slow-moving topic. Disagree for conversations about personal opinions (most of forums), especially ones with time context. When you post on a three year old thread, everyone else has left the room. That's fine if you want to share how you finally got this old sound card working on a specific OS, lame if there was a lively discussion about working at Lyft versus Uber.

Firstly there's a 3rd type: someone asks for help and you post a suggested solution 3 years later. Extremely useful for all the lurkers who also had the same question and are reading looking for possible solutions.

But secondly, even your own counterexample I don't think checks out. If I'm browsing your forum & interested in perspectives on working at Lyft v Uber, I absolutely want to read a recent update and contrast that with what people thought 3 yrs ago v now.

Tbh, the "I got my sound card working" post seems least appropriate of them all (but still ok to do imo, necroposts are good)

My sound card example was supposed to be like your 3rd type, so we agree there.

Old and current experiences are definitely both valuable. Just start a new thread. It's too easy for other members to miss the dates when it comes back to the top. Then they're reading and responding to old posts from absent people like they're here and now.

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