It's because they're dicks, right?

December 12, 2009 1:03 AM

Why do people on (phpBB-style) web boards have such a thing against thread necromancy?

When an old thread is resurrected by a comment, some of these people just lose their shit, even when it's fully legitimate. What are the reasons for this? I have my theories (which aren't flattering), but I don't really get it. I'd like to hear from someone who knows.

Why is it bad? Why is it really bad?

posted by fleacircus to computers & internet (18 answers total)

Having been a forum admin in years past, I think for me it had to do with the fact that a forum thread is basically a conversation. If six months ago you had a conversation with your friend about tacos and you found out something new and interesting about tacos today, you don't start off with, "Oh, hey, remember how we talked about tacos six months ago? And you said X, and I said Y... well, I just found out Z." You have a new conversation about tacos.

Dredging up an old thread tends to require people who were there at the time to at least skim it again to re-establish context, and new people may just have to sit down and read the whole thing, and so on. Is it the end of the world? Not really. But it's a lot easier to start a new thread including only the background information that's actually necessary for context.

Especially since phpBB doesn't gather replies with the post that was replied to, over time, if you don't set a limit someplace, it's very easy to end up with a hundred-page thread where only the forum regulars can participate because people keep bringing up something someone said months ago and nobody wants to re-read the whole thing to catch up. Not everybody minds that, but I didn't think, as an administrator, that it was desirable for the place I was running.
posted by larkspur at 1:57 AM on December 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

I don't have an answer for your question exactly, but I'll point out that this behaviour isn't an absolute: this behaviour varies a lot between communities. I've read and participated in a coupe of boards where starting new threads "unnecessarily" is actually discouraged in favour of necromancy. Several times I've seen people start a thread only to be told by the old members that "we already have a thread for that!", telling the user to join a thread that's been inactive for months and locking the new one. If I remember correctly the XKCD fora were an example of this, and actually have advice in their FAQ to re-use old threads rather than starting new ones.

This behaviour has always baffled me, because it's not as if the forum software is going to run out of raw material to make new threads... I tend to think that this is mostly just about old forum members having somehow decided that This Is The Way Things Should Be Done, and getting satisfaction from keeping the community running exactly the way they want it. Just a little bit of harmless power tripping. The strong reaction is probably because you're coming into a community that they feel themselves to be a core part of, and acting in a (trivial) way that they disagree with. Think of it as a neighbourhood committee getting weirdly angry about the new shade of yellow on your garden wall: it's not important in itself, they're just annoyed that you're ignoring their claimed authority.
posted by metaBugs at 3:24 AM on December 12, 2009

It's incredibly annoying. I hate it when I'm reading through a thread, reading everyone's opinions and getting ready to post my own, only to find out that the last post was from 2004 or something. What's the point of continuing the discussion in '09?

Not to mention necro'd threads, at least in the forums I'm a part of, usually consist of other people responding and then deleting their answers or simply following up with, "Oops, I didn't realize this was so old!" so the discussion never continues anyway. And then the thread is locked.
posted by biochemist at 3:51 AM on December 12, 2009

People often assume they are recent conversations and join in accordingly.
posted by fire&wings at 5:06 AM on December 12, 2009

I think it's a user interface thing. In the days with reasonably competent newsreader software, (and later, QWK style offline reading) you read individual messages, even if they were organized into threads. The "forum" type UI doesn't really offer that and instead when you comment on some old matter you muck up everyone's index of discussion: the page with the list of threads on it.

I'm personally not too fond of the "forum" way of doing message bases, and this is one of the reasons. The entire thread is tossed around as a conceptual and literal unit, rather than individual messages from individual users, which is how things were handled in the Usenet and BBS days. Because of this, when you do something like comment on an old thread you're not just adding a single message for folks to read: you're lobbing an entire abandoned discussion at them, and they dislike it.
posted by majick at 6:14 AM on December 12, 2009

+1 on the "this isn't universal". It's just a preference. On better forums than the majority of those run on phpBB, there's a sense that something is being built, and a hope to avoid wasted effort.

It's exactly the same principle as a FAQ: We've already talked about this, if you've something new to add, add it to the existing discussion, otherwise just read the damn thing yourself.

AskMe would be well served by this, I think: if you could bump threads, you'd eventually end up with the ultimate answers to various topics, covering all possible nuances and edge cases.

As for the opposite, well, phpBB is stupid. It's counter-productive for good discussion, and so the communities that glom around it end up making stupid rules. "No! Waste our time! We like saying the same stuff time and again! Here check out my new sig!"
posted by bonaldi at 6:26 AM on December 12, 2009

There are other forums where people lose their shit if you start a duplicate thread, even if the older one is four years old and the title was spelled wrong.
posted by danb at 7:21 AM on December 12, 2009

I'll definitely second the people who say it's not universal. Heck, it's not universal even within a given community. On my site we have about equal numbers of people who get annoyed because we're having yet another conversation about X and people who get annoyed that someone has floated an old conversation about X back to the top.

Part of it is just old hats asserting their dominance over whatever newbie just showed up and screwed up some minor forum rule. They're throwing their weight around because they want to.

Part of it is a kind of drawn out groupthink. People start out mentioning that a thread was old, and then everyone mentions it. And then people mention it rudely. And then everyone piles on as if the newbie just kicked the forum's new puppy. No one person would actually be as annoyed as they sound like they are if there wasn't a grand forum tradition of jumping all over people for bumping old threads.

Part of it is that it can be annoying, especially if the board has since lost track of what you've read vs. not read. Here's this potentially very long conversation that you now have to revisit. If you made controversial comments on it way back when you may be called on to defend them again. If the discussion in general was contentious, bumping it may bring back old feelings and arguments that were better left buried.

As well, front page space is actually limited. Bumping some old thread that people lost interest in takes up a slot that would otherwise have had a more recent conversation on it, thus making it more likely that the newer conversations will die out. As a single incident, that's not that relevant, but in the aggregate, it can be frustrating.

And finally, I'd say it's because the people who do this -- especially on forums where not doing it is a well-established aspect of forum culture -- often don't do it well. They'll add comments that demonstrate they haven't read the entirety of the thread, they'll completely miss the point of what the thread was, they'll have googled in and demonstrated no interest in the community as a whole, but basically asked the community to help them with one specific issue. In short, it's often less that the thread is old and more that the bumper is an asshat.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:41 AM on December 12, 2009

I think the anti threadromancy stance starts for the same reason Matt closes Meta threads. Things got ugly in some poster child thread; a few months later someone reignited the flame war by bumping the thread to the top with a new comment; and so the no threadromancy policy gets set. Plus for a lot of hobby topics there really isn't all that much new to talk about; forcing new threads keeps the board alive.

metaBugs writes "I don't have an answer for your question exactly, but I'll point out that this behaviour isn't an absolute: this behaviour varies a lot between communities. I've read and participated in a coupe of boards where starting new threads 'unnecessarily' is actually discouraged in favour of necromancy. Several times I've seen people start a thread only to be told by the old members that 'we already have a thread for that!', telling the user to join a thread that's been inactive for months and locking the new one. If I remember correctly the XKCD fora were an example of this, and actually have advice in their FAQ to re-use old threads rather than starting new ones."

I'll second this. I read four 40K forums, 1 pretty regularly and the other three when I have time. They are equally split between !No threadromancy Stupid NooB! and !There's already a 10 year old thread on this Stupid Noob!. Keeping straight which is which is too much work so I tend just not to post/comment on the lesser three.
posted by Mitheral at 8:23 AM on December 12, 2009

And finally, I'd say it's because the people who do this -- especially on forums where not doing it is a well-established aspect of forum culture -- often don't do it well. They'll add comments that demonstrate they haven't read the entirety of the thread, they'll completely miss the point of what the thread was, they'll have googled in and demonstrated no interest in the community as a whole, but basically asked the community to help them with one specific issue. In short, it's often less that the thread is old and more that the bumper is an asshat.

This, more than anything. As someone who runs a forum, and someone who participates in other forums, nothing frustrates me more than this - someone who obviously doesn't care about the thread, or the community, and is putting the burden of reading / thinking / providing on everyone else by bringing back the thread without putting forethought into it. If they warm up by saying "I read this thread all the way through, and would like to bring up the following intelligent points, which are still valid in the wake of 4 years of dormancy and other changes in the forums and world around us," then I would be OK with it.
posted by GJSchaller at 8:24 AM on December 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

There are other forums where people lose their shit if you start a duplicate thread, even if the older one is four years old and the title was spelled wrong.

I see what you did there.
posted by The Michael The at 10:17 AM on December 12, 2009

I think you got it right in the title of your post. It's usually not worth getting bent out of shape over words on the internets, and yet..
posted by citron at 11:09 AM on December 12, 2009

Whenever I've seen people necro threads, it's almost always to drudge up old drama/flame-outs/etc. That makes people annoyed because it's shit-stirring.
posted by Nattie at 11:51 AM on December 12, 2009

This is more an issue of netiquette being driven by system design that anything about normal human interaction. It's annoying because, well, imagine if the Kindle version of The Two Towers rearranged all the chapters dynamically as the Frodo and Sam, or Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas or Merry and Pipin plots advanced. Good luck finding your place in that, right? Yet that's the approach they decided to use for phpBB.

Most forums divide the world into discussion themes based on topic, but there is another axis - there are discussions where someone wants a simple answer to a question or wants to post a link to something cool. These should probably be allowed to die and be replaced with fresh discussions pretty regularly as earlier information may no longer be correct, old link have dried up and blown away, etc. Bringing these back tend to push useful information down the stack in lieu of information that is probably out of date.

Then there are the eternal discussions - things that would end up in FAQs if there was a good answer. The best example I can think of is on the homebrew MAME arcade machine forum I was on - there are many ways to do a light gun, but, last I looked, none of them ideal. Lots of people giving details of what they were doing, how they did it and what they did and didn't like about it. A few years ago that was like a 40 page discussion.

Then there are the flogging a dead horse topics. Things that are mostly philosophical in nature, usually with two extreme factions that would just as soon die as come to any sort of agreement. These may have been interesting once but like many real world causes, now it's inhabited by fanatics and the trolls who want to poke at them. Beware.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 11:51 AM on December 12, 2009

There are other forums where people lose their shit if you start a duplicate thread, even if the older one is four years old and the title was spelled wrong.

Fresh content on FPP's is MeFi's raison d'etre, however. I didn't phrase it too well but I'm more interested in the reasons behind why necromancy is thought of as bad, not so much the losing of shit that might follow from that.
posted by fleacircus at 2:43 PM on December 12, 2009

Favoriting the ones that covered stuff I hadn't thought of or had some anecdata. Sorry, other people I agree with and think are also right! It's how the AskMe cookie crumbles, I guess.
posted by fleacircus at 3:24 PM on December 12, 2009

(er, bestanswering, not favoriting)
posted by fleacircus at 3:25 PM on December 12, 2009

I was fairly recently reprimanded for necromancy at another forum and wondered what the big deal was (I was new to the forum and was doing it for sillies and wasn't aware of the rule). So, thanks to the OP for asking and everyone else for answering.

As it happens I'm now a mod at that same forum. Ha!
posted by deborah at 1:12 AM on December 13, 2009