We have a longstanding policy about avoiding thread necro'ing in year-old (plus or minus some months) topics.

Can we just fix this by enabling some option to automatically lock or otherwise disable responding to posts above some threshold? It would eliminate a lot of annoyance for moderators and, especially, users (who I'm sure love getting the silly slap-on-the-wrist warnings from us for something that, it seems, the site could easily just prevent them from doing). It would also eliminate any subjective wiggle-room in "how old is too old" determinations from moderators.

I was about to start a thread with this in mind just now when I saw the ultimate necro'ing I've seen here. Someone posting a reply to a 2006 thread in the lounge

Yeah, I've always felt the mods warning "please don't necro..." is kind of comical, because people that do this are mostly new users and haven't seen the past warnings and the next new user that will necro wouldn't have seen the current warning...

and so its never ending

So like josh suggest, why not disable the reply button for all post over 60 days (or whatever length is too old)

Why do we have this policy? I mean, you could also stop caring that $random newbie digs up old thread.

In a sense, it's good, as at least he has searched for it. The regulars will recognize the new post as useless and not reply, or reply along the lines, "it has been 5 years since the last post, I think the issue has been resolved already" or so.

Soon enough new users will learn it's quite useless to post in old threads, and stop doing it, wouldn't they?

3 hours ago, Alberth said:

Soon enough new users will learn it's quite useless to post in old threads, and stop doing it, wouldn't they?

The problem with new users in this regard, is that there is a continuous stream of them. New users learning over time means nothing for even newer users who join. By the time they have learned, another set of users would have arrived, etc.

There's also the issue that most stuff that was relevant 5+ years ago (to name an example which is not on the most extreme side I've seen) is likely to not be relevant today. As an example, a thread might pop up complaing about an issue in Unity 2.0, with the new post advocating for updating to Unity 5.0 due to it being fixed there.

Fair enough, so that leaves you auto-disabling replying then.

You could do something based on reputation or whatever, but it seems hardly worth the trouble.

Thanks for the explanation

8 hours ago, Alberth said:

Why do we have this policy? I mean, you could also stop caring that $random newbie digs up old thread.

 

It's a good question and I thought about just suggesting this as well instead of what I said in my original post.

However, for me it comes down the fact that allowing these necro posts tends to bury new discussion at the end of 5+ page threads from the turn of the century. This makes it less discoverable, because there's a bunch of old crap to wade through first before you necessarily have the context, and wading through that old stuff is potentially totally irrelevant because of how old it is (things may be different now), and it's consequently easy for some posters to then derail the new discussion entirely because they picked up on some statement that was true in 2001 but isn't now, and they post to "correct" that 2001 poster (perhaps because they too didn't notice the date).

And that's just for the well-intentioned necro posters, who maybe don't realize they're doing it. There's also the set of posters who reply to these threads just to be jerks and "get the last word in," so it's nice to be able to shut that down.

9 hours ago, Alberth said:

Why do we have this policy? I mean, you could also stop caring that $random newbie digs up old thread.

It does actually create a problem. Newcomer sees a question, doesn't realize it's old, and posts an answer. That moves the thread up to the top. Others see there's a "new" thread and chime in - sometimes the thread goes beyond one page, and new arrivers (also not noticing it's old) don't see that the OP got perfectly good answers on a later page. Besides, on a really old thread, the OP might not even be around anymore to see the answer. tldr: necroing can cause time-wasting for others.

I don't disagree, but some work will need to be done. While there is a setting to disable posting after so many days, there are some negative effects to doing this. Basically, some custom work needs to be done. Not impossible, just not a quick fix.