Necromancing threads

[xouman]

Hi to all,

I enjoy talking about decks, new and old, and lately I've found some threads to be closed and open again because of the "Necromancy" rule. While I understand and agree that new ideas or reviews could involve new threads, sometimes is just the same thread, just that nobody has said anything in a while. Sometimes is a bit annoying to look for some old post and find that it's in another thread, probably with a different name.

Which is the main purpose of avoiding necromancing? Perhaps the lapse should be greater than a month? Maybe in the past the forum was far more active, but now is hard to have some threads active EACH month, specially those in Vintage Deck Discussion .

This is probably not the right place to say that but I couldn't find any proper place (in Rules and Regulations maybe?). Thanks for your time.

[wiley]

I just thought I would chime in here from the perspective of someone who has delved in to past threads for research on decks; the rules regarding thread necromancy are a strange beast to navigate.

The current way of handling it, ie locking the old thread and separating the new posts into a new thread are very bad for archival purposes.  It creates a situation where you now need to find multiple threads to follow the lines of thought brought up in the first.  It also creates a big problem with finding the thread when things like board reorganization happens, since the link to the new thread is no longer valid, and search functions aren't always that great.

I think that if you want to enforce your current necromancy rules then you need to automatically lock threads that have no activity in them after your set period of time.  Though, given the general inactivity of the boards at the moment I would strongly advise the time limit be more than a couple of months.

[Prospero]

The staff is currently discussing the issue of thread necromancy and working on a solution.

[boxian]

I understand that the staff is working on it right now, but I just kind of want to pose a question I've always had:

What is the point of having a search function and a policy against necro-ing threads? If you have a search function and desire people to use threads to discuss that one topic, then when it fades from relevancy and suddenly becomes interesting again, wouldn't necro-ing the thread be the best thing? It just continues the discussion from before and puts it in historical context/one place for discussion of everything. If a forum is adamantly against necro-ing, then there's no need for a search function - you would/should just look at what is recent, if your question isn't there, make a new thread and start the new discussion. You can't go back four months or whatever to the last time it was talked about, or even years, and bring that back anyways because that is impolite forum behavior.

Anyways, I've never quite understood the anti-necroing threads approach, but I figure there's a good reason behind it. Just my 2c

[Smmenen]

I concur with the OP.

I would think it preferable to revive an older thread discussing an issue than creating a new thread to discuss an identical, similar or directly related issue.  

I can no longer even recall what the original harms of thread necromancy were to inspire such a rule, but they are benign at best.  

Given the orientation of the web towards search and search engines, threads have life long beyond their original activity.  A rule that encourages necromancy rather than new threads would be preferred, and create more continuity over time.  See Wiley's post.

The idea of locking old threads is ludicrous, given the long-form nature of vintage discussions. The Source's long form threads on deck achetypes are preferred to continuously opening new threads.   The rule against thread necromancy is now outdated.

My 2 cents.  

[Godder]

This was brought up again recently by Smmenen, and following staff discussion, we agree that, given current posting volumes, the rule is no longer required, so I have removed reference to it from the rules.

I note that the examples in the rules are not exhaustive, and necros would still need to not breach any other rules, e.g. threads still need to be relevant (threads from 2004 would have a high bar to meet, for example), but we will take a common sense approach, and assume users will do the same.

(It seemed appropriate to necro an old thread about necros to announce this policy change, somehow... )

[Godder]

To add to this, and to bump it, please note that the two Adepts groups have been merged into one, and the Rules updated accordingly.

Additionally, the list of sanctions/punishments has been added to. While Verbal and Full Warnings are and will continue to be the primary sanctions, we have also added Thread, Topic and Forum bans, and suspensions as additional options. We hope these will not be required often!