Tell HN: Curb Your Necroposting Aversion | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Curb Your Necroposting Aversion

8 pointsoxplot4 comments

This is directed at those hardworking forum admins among you. Please relax your rules on necroposting. A common scenario is someone asking how to do something. At the time, it either gets answered sub-optimally or not at all. Over time, it manages to get to top of the search engine results (why? no idea! but it does far too often). New solutions now exist but the forum admin has decided to lock down the thread to avoid necroposting, essentially wasting the SEO advantage they have unintentionally gained by not allowing useful answers to be posted, and subsequently making it harder for people to find answers.

Necroposting is definitely not that great in general, but there are circumstances where it's very helpful.

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Vaguely related: GitHub bots autoclosing issues for inactivity after a really short period, which leads to people creating yet another issue, which leads to a mess of fragmented conversations in several issues, until someone closes one issue and says to continue the conversation on another issue. The earlier this happens, the better it is.

I frequently create issues on-the-fly on projects I just happen to bump into (e.g. when following a HN link) to point out a small bug or documentation improvement. Just spend some time trying to be helpful. When stalebot later kicks in, I usually don't respond unless they are projects I'm actively working with (where I'd probably PR). Though irrational it makes me feel less positive about a project when stalebot closes my small token of help. I wonder how others feel about this.

It's rude and insulting to autoclose issues, especially if they are good and valid ones.

Even a manual WONTFIX is less rude.

Yes. A case of it working well: https://github.com/minio/minio-py/issues/829

I found this issue for a problem I had with MinIO. I wrote a prototype: docs first and screencast on how the API would be. I then asked the other user if they had implemented it and if the API I was thinking about would suit them as it suited me. MinIO's CTO replied that it was the correct usage, but that it was not on the roadmap, which is understandable.

I then started implementing the actual commands I needed first (host, ls, etc). Some time later, someone tweeted at us and asked how they could use the library. I then put it on PyPI (Python Package Index). I checked upon that person recently and they told be they've been using it for months without a problem. The other person also had commented and said they've been using it.

https://pypistats.org/packages/bmc

It's a really, really, small library for a niche need, also asked people for feedback here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540342

Now I'm getting feature requests on that issue, but I'll soon do it properly in a repo to make it easier for people.

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