WTH is with all these 5 year old threads?

[TempestTost]

As the title says.

Reanimated by ‘The Joy of Writing’, for whatever reason.

I’ve reported.

Sometimes it's an attempt to shift discussion away from /reduce visibility of a current thread/s

We had this last week too.

That's what I was thinking.

It's tiresome behaviour in the extreme.

Is it the Charlie Kirk stuff that they are trying to hide? Seems weird to me.

I've no idea whether it's coincidence or deliberate or someone who has poor manners/social skills.

I've commented on plenty of those threads, certainly don't want to hide them.

Since you are here - why are you posting on 5 year old threads? MN gives a warning that these threads are old so it's not like you don't have an excuse for not knowing.

@TheJoyOfWriting every forum has its house rules. On Mumsnet, it's poor form to bump a zombie thread as it confuses people into thinking it's a "live" issue as people seldom click the date of the original post. If you bump a thread the original poster is no longer around to respond unless they are a regular and other people pile in without realising it's a zombie. It also makes it harder for current threads and OPs to get their threads seen as it buries them under old bumped threads.

The exceptions are if the OP themselves comes back to update, or if new relevant information comes to light that will help the OP. You can ask for updates, but that's not always good etiquette on here either because lots of people only read the first post and then start answering the OP even though the OP is no longer on the thread.

Oh, I've been getting a lot of notifications about responses to post's on old threads, I did think to myself, you're a bit late to the party on that one, I didn't realise it was a ploy.
Fortunately I always sort Newest rather that Recently added to, so it hasn't caused a problem for me, which is perhaps why I didn't clock something fishy was going on.
Thanks for the heads up, but now I'd love to know what the reason for it is???🤔

Thanks - I didn’t realise it was a tactic either. I’ve been clicking to the end of some of them thinking ‘But what’s new?’ 🤔

I think so. The fact the KF farms thread and the school shooter thread are also being spammed makes me think it is in fact a ploy.

Not sure why a TRA would bump the Minneapolis shooter thread to remind everyone that a trans identified male committed the atrocity everyone has temporarily forgotten about after Charlie Kirk. Weird behaviour.

It's even more tiresome when you get tagged on a zombie thread and put on the spot about some throwaway comment from a conversation you've forgotten.

I've had that with a few months-old zombie threads being resurrected. With a 5 year old thread there's a good chance the OP will no longer be around. It wouldn't occur to me to go looking for ancient threads to resurrect - better to start a new one and probably an old hand will remember a previous thread with useful info.

Just seems a very odd way of doing things.

If there's something in an old thread that a poster genuinely thinks they'd like to explore I think starting a new thread and pasting a link might be the way forward.

I do occasionally post on middle aged(?) threads to keep relevant new information together. I put some of the articles about Dr Hopper on one of the Eunuch Maker threads, for example.

I’m not sure it’s necessarily that thought through. I think people who are very new to both MN and this whole conversation area here are searching for specific search terms and then finding/posting in very old threads because they aren’t bothered to understand where they’re posting. They just have a vague idea of MN as a sort of hive mind and are just plopping in to vent whatever’s front of mind for them on the topic.

I long for the days of netiquette, when people generally bothered with reading a community’s threads for a while and getting a sense of how it works before diving in.

I'm on another hobby forum, and someone recently posted a question to the OP on a long running thread, and one of the mods had to step in and say "Dude, the OP's account has been inactive for 12 years, I really doubt he's going to reply" 😂

Maybe it's an age thing with me, but if I join a new forum I like to lurk for a while, get a feel of the place, a sense of the personalities, learn something about the style and the contentious issues and the in-jokes.

There might be two different dynamics happening at the same time. We have posters who seem keen on goading and spamming and we have had over the past couple of weeks zombie threads being revived.

I agree that zombie threads shouldn’t be revived unless they are directly relevant because new information has come through.

This poster has been spamming current threads and reviving old ones.

Im on a forum where i got into trouble for starting a new thread when the topic was already being discussed on a thread that hadnt been touched in 10 years.

So forums do vary.

Its very frustrating to get on to page 4 and think 'hang on, sonethings not right' and realise its a thread from 5 years ago. Especially when the post that bought it from the dead isnt adding anything.

I need to train myself to look at the date.

ah... ok. I am thinking of a different person spamming though. I was thinking of the Crazy poster who I suspect has been banned by now.

Recently, another zombie reviver (revivor?) poster posted on a thread and picked out loads of comments and demanded answers from those posters. Who had last been on that thread more than two years ago.

I, trying to be helpful, pointed out that it was a zombie thread and the other posters on the thread may well have left/changed name/etc etc. The zombie reviver poster (who, to be fair, I think was posting more in misguided but good faith than our current ZR) said that thanked me but wanted to have the conversation.

But why not then just start a new thread?

And as pp's have said, there's a message from MNHQ pointing out that such threads are zombie threads.

So, it's just tiresome community disruption.

There was a suggestion a while ago of locking threads that hadn’t been posted on for a certain time period (6 months?) so they could only be reanimated by the OP. I thought that was a really good idea.