Please 🙏 Old Threads

[Summersunshinebliss]

Afternoon Mumsnet HQ. I am wondering if its possible to look into old threads being closed? It's really, really annoying, over the past week active has been cluttered with threads that are a year or more old.

Hi OP,

We do understand it can be frustrating when older threads resurface in Active. This comes up from time to time, so we previously made a change that alerts users when they're about to post on an older thread.

We don’t routinely close old threads, as they can still be useful for posters looking for support or wanting to update others on their situation. We’ve often found that allowing those follow-ups can be really valuable to Mumsnetters, especially in advice and support areas.

If any individual threads are causing concern, please let us know and we'll take a look.

@LilyMumsnet one possible tech solution could be to have a symbol eg 🧟‍♀️ (zombie emoji) that gets added automatically to the start of a thread title (so shown in the threads menus) for any thread that follows a pattern of :

• Thread was started more than 12 weeks ago
• There has been a gap of at least 6 weeks during which no posts were made during the last 8 weeks.

The problem with the existing "warning" is that only the initial resurrecter sees it. If that person ignores the warning and resurrects the thread, we then get a dozen posts responding to the initial very old problem, along with a dozen others whoses posts of "zombie-ignore" nevertheless keep it active. So some kind of warning that persists would be great.

@ExpertArchFormat good suggestions.

@LilyMumsnet thanks 😊

They aren't causing concern or anything more annoying really. It's a shame people are ignoring the mumsnet heads up and posting on years old threads 😩

I think that’s a really good idea @ExpertArchFormat

(… although I’d bet that many posters still wouldn’t ‘see’ it!)

I think a big part of the problem is that if you google anything parenting related like eg (random example) "how do I stop my mum from giving my baby chocolate?" there's always a result from mumsnet.com in the top few results and it's always a years-old thread (eg this one) so it's non-mumsnetters who don't understand how this works who do the resurrecting.

I think they should stay open in case the OP wants to update. I guess they could link the thread maybe? I don’t know, it doesn’t bother me. I always check the thread safe before I read it though.

Yes they should stay open for updates.

But this can also cause heartbreak. Eg I think there was a recent thread wherea dog had been behaving violently, and OP got pages of advice and the dog was eventually pts as too dangerous otherwise, and vet found a brain tumor that caused the problem, and then a long time later the OP resurrected the thread to show photos of her new pup - and was bombarded with advice to PTS because people didn't notice the original post was old

Ongoing warnings woukd be really helpful.