"For those that don''t know...the dredging up of old threads is commonly known as necromancy (raising the dead) and is considered very poor ettiquette" Why? I can see lots of reasons why a new member might want to resurrect a thread. What if the thread was not answered fully?What if it was answered incorrectly? How about it being plain old interesting and the new member feels they can bring something new to the discussion?

I can see it as an offense to resurect a hostile topic or concluded debate thread (such as the "What does A.I. stand for?" discussion from which the quote was extracted). However, if the thread is a valid discussion of a problem related to the forum topic (ie people actually asking help for a specific problem) I think we can tollerate it. After all, is that not better than opening a new thread? What if someone has provided an alternate or original solution to the question or has new theory to add?

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Original post by jack_1313
I can see it as an offense to resurect a hostile topic or concluded debate thread (such as the "What does A.I. stand for?" discussion from which the quote was extracted). However, if the thread is a valid discussion of a problem related to the forum topic (ie people actually asking help for a specific problem) I think we can tollerate it. After all, is that not better than opening a new thread? What if someone has provided an alternate or original solution to the question or has new theory to add?

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I agree with this.

-Predictor
http://will.dwinnell.com

Usually it''s a bad idea because the original posters aren''t around to defend their positions. It may not be a problem for the person who actually resurrected the thread, but subsequent posters may not notice. Therefore it''s usually better to start a new thread and link back to the old one for reference purposes.

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Forums are a very poor medium for searching old information, and rely on redundancy. It''s sad to say it''s clearer and easier to follow what''s going on this way. If you want closure on subjects and need make them easily searchable and accessible, use a directory with a wiki of some sort (wikipedia like).

Alex

Obviously there are always situations which go against the ''rules'' that seem reasonable from a certain perspective. In general though, necromancing old threads is not done for good reasons... as Kylotan said, if there''s something new to contribute to the discussion, start a new thread and link to the old one. If we simply dredged up old threads to add to them, a discussion on RPG NPCs, for example, would be about 30 pages long (we''ve had that discussion about 10 times in the past couple of years).

Unfortunately, most people don''t make enough use of the archives of these forums before asking questions. If people did use these forums correctly, old posts wouldn''t get dredged up and only new thoughts would ever get posted. That''s not going to happen though.

I understand the point your trying to make, however we need to make sure people don''t necro old threads for the purpose of being trolls. Thus, we put a blanket ban on necromancy (with the obvious tolerance where it is actually a good thing) and suggest that people link to old threads, rather than just tack something on to the end of them. Obviously, in all of this, some common sense has to rein supreme... that''s why we use human moderators, rather than AI moderators!

Cheers,

Timkin

In this case the thread "What do the initials AI stand for" was necromanced by an AP. It is possible that the guy is unaware of the rules because he bumped into the archive through a search engine (these things also happen to me sometimes).

Just type in google: What do the initials AI stand for?

For this reason it should be made impossible for an AP to post to an old thread.