WTH is with all these 5 year old threads?

[TempestTost]

As the title says.

Zombie threads also then force posters to revive old user names.

This is a problem as well.

Might be someone like me - when I first joined I was blithely commenting right and left and was roundly dealt with by the mods; I hadn't heard of 'zombie threads'.

Aside from the posters who do it on purpose, I think it's because of the pointless and irritating "Similar Threads" box at the end of threads. It doesn't look at how old threads are, just if they're "similar".

But even then, if those posts are zombie threads, there's the MNHQ message about it being an old thread. I picked at random one of the 'similar threads' options at the bottom of this thread - 'I volunteer in an Oxfam bookshop - AMA, which hasn't been posted on since 2024 and the message is there.

Given it sits directly above the comment box, you then have to make a conscious decision to ignore the message.

And then there's the ones who quote multiple posts from the zombie threads, tag posters who may no longer be around, and demand answers to questions. That takes quite a bit of effort.

I have made the suggestion about not allowing anyone to revive a thread except the OP on site stuff threads over the years. I still think it's a good idea but as far as I recall, the people who disagreed with me said they wanted to be able to ask the OP for updates, or allow OPs to update under a different account or username (and which I accept is more likely to happen if it's years later). I think the zombie thread message is intended as a compromise but clearly it only works if people respect the conventions of the forum.

I do think that posters should heed @SionnachRuadh and lurk for some time before commenting, just to get a feel for the house rules and style. Every forum has them, not just MN.

Yep - all those faux naif "Oh I am new to all this and I just found this site and wanted to know what you think about [this thing I think is a killer gotcha to pwn the TERFs]" posts 🙄

Anyone genuine will spend 10 minutes or so looking at recent posts and searching keywords, or these days at least ask AI if it's been covered already, before posting, and if they still feel they need to post they'll put it in context of what's already been said.

The failure to do so is a 100% killer giveaway of bad intent that they can never disguise.

It's not so much a problem if it's the occasional thread but there are so many at the moment. Tbh if it's a 'new' to me thread that's got several hundred posts I'm fairly sure before I click that it'll be a zombie. Though I have been caught out.

that used to be netiquette 101.

in the old days of bulletin boards etc.

i have just resuggested that, again, in the site stuff topic.

I find it absolutely infuriating that they aren't auto locked a year or 6 months after the last post, and maybe allow 1 "reply" that actually starts a brand new thread linked to the old one.

MN themselves don't like the zombie threads and (presumably for statistics for advertisers reasons) prefer users to start new ones.

@TheJoyOfWriting why are you doing this?

Perhaps MN could put the date the thread was started as well as the date of the most recent post?

Who is the crazy poster?

A now seemingly banned MRA shitting up threads this morning. His name was “Crazy” something.

Charming

That is the one. Crazytime or something like that. Was also telling women that they should be ashamed for not being open to their husband’s sex fetishes on support threads.

People just don't read. Every thread shows extremely clearly right at the top how many posts there are and when the OP was posted. Even when they're quite short threads people answer the same questions and make the same points over and over again, and completely ignore how long ago the OP was posted. I don't understand it.

In the case of “Joy,” it appears to be deliberate - he/she has been called out on it multiple times, always responds with “Oh, I didn’t know. I promise I won’t do it again,” and then pops off to do it again on another thread. Unbelievably tiresome.

I find the way that “Joy” poster interacts very strange but it might just be me. I find it spikes my anxiety to reply to them so I’ve stopped.

"Someone" has seen a thread/topic they didn't like being discussed, over the past 48(?) hours, and wants it pushed off the first page.

It also clutters up my "I'm on" page when people do this because I am old I've posted on a lot of threads over the years and and bumping old threads repeatedly is really annoying and crowds out the threads I'm on right now.

I don't particularly love going back to threads I posted on in 2020 at the best of times, probably in a haze of lockdown remote working and online learning misery. And think about how much the world has changed in the last 5 years! Just on the topic of this board alone, in 2020 it was only a year since the Tories self-ID consultation. We were 1 year away from the Forstater decision and 5 years away from the FWS decision.

It is not productive to bump threads from that time as it literally was a different time and the discussion has moved on.

We've certainly seen an influx of flying monkeys who really don't want some particular things being discussed.

I'm slightly alert to odd behaviour at the moment thanks to having questions fired at me by another zombie reviver.

Yes, once in a while if it happens I just think it's an accident, maybe the "similar threads" thing as mentioned, new users.

This seems coordinated to me.

I am really curious why it's the Kirk stuff that they seem so desperate to hide?

I do think FWR gets targeted specifically because there are a lot of really informed, smart posters with a lot of historical knowledge of political movements and such. People add a lot of context here you don't see so much in places like AIBU.

The first couple of Kirk threads on Chat got nuked pretty quickly because of all the gloating over the murder by people who think they're virtuous.

I'm fine with that. They weren't adding anything to the sum total of human knowledge, and the posters might have regretted their comments in the morning.

The Kirk threads on FWR have been pretty informative and useful, but have also been subject to heavy duty trolling and derailment. More so than on most controversial issues.

I wonder. It feels coordinated.

It does.