old threads are easily resurrected
 

Even from years ago and you need to read the dates to notice it. Maybe an old/mouldy/cobweb look or at least a different colour could apply to older posts.

well they don't have the quick reply box visible, and they have a holding page to click through. You'd think that'd be enough, huh? There ARE some legitimate reasons to reply to an old thread though, so we can't make it impossible, although the significant majority of necroposts are not generally beneficial to the thread. I don't really understand why people sign up just to say "this was useful" on a thread, and even less so to moan at mods asking people not to drag up threads, thereby dragging them up even more. I presume the latter is more in the troll camp.

In my experience, many of those who do so are bots.

In my experience, I say that to them and then I get hate mail!

Having had a few threads where folks say "this was useful" long after I posted them I'd like to say I for one appreciate seeing that the post is still helping folks.

When I find things online that are helpful to me if it is possible I usually like to comment that it was. Also sometimes it is helpful to have clarifying information that provides more detail.

Also if multiple people say the solution worked for them it is more indicative that it is in fact a more global solution. That is to say some solutions are only good in specific scenarios that don't necessarily apply to everyone that has seen the issue.

On the other hand folks posting fixes to already solved issues in old threads is often annoying as most of the time their posts show they didn't bother to read the entire thread because what they posted:
-Either was already in the thread as a solution.
-More often than not was already in the thread and noted as NOT being a solution.

On balance I think leaving old threads open is probably more beneficial than not.

Also some of the newest users use them (I don't know why.) Maybe they don't read the original date. Maybe some search engine offered the old post as close to their issue. All of us need to decide if any post new or old is helpful. What I might consider useless may help someone else.

Not sure there is any bad reason to consider some warning. New users would not know the color reason. Guess it could help.

Why? How does it help you? it just makes things more confusing, and doesn't change the fact that was or was not useful.

If you'd read the rest of my post you'd see I suggested having multiple people say it helped them also lends more weight to it being a global solution. I disagree that it makes it more confusing to say "this helped me".

It's absolutely more confusing, hence the OP posting this thread. It's not about what they add it's that they resurrect a dead thread, and other members waste their time trying to solve a question asked 7 years ago.

I also appreciate very much when someone bothers to "write" that my solution
helped him.
This gives me a feel that I did a good thing by not keeping mum about that
solution.
It gives me a feel that community is getting helped with what I posted years
back!

Saying a "thanks, it helped" is NOT confusing.
The confusing part is that other people don't know that the thread is old.

For this, owners of the website need to implement a mechanism to tell the
other people that the thread in which they are posting is old.

Both cases are different.

The case number two has many solutions which have been listed out in many
other threads in the past.

And that goes back to my complaint about people not reading the entire thread before posting. If one looks at an entire thread rather than just dashing off a quick one liner one might actually realize the post was an old one AND that it already had a solution in it so they don't need to post at all.

If seeing discussion in old threads is a bother users can simply focus on "zero reply threads".

Of course SOME old thread don't have solutions so newer posts are attempting to solve them. Since everyone doesn't upgrade all systems every day there is no saying that an old thread updated 5 years later might not in fact help someone else that is still running a legacy system.

We kind of got off track. The OP suggested a visual hint.

The situation that prompted this thread was one where I did read the posts for their content; but did not read the dates on them. The thread had just been bumped by another user so a sign that the first post was old is what I have in mind.

Last time this came up I had a similar suggestion; I actually implemented a whitespace gap between posts rather than colour change, but it probably wouldn't be that hard to change the indicator.

Would it perhaps be possible to send "spam" to users that created a new thread to decide after X days (30?) about the current status of the thread - e.g. if to mark a thread as "Solved" or as something else ("Gave up", "Workaround found", "Meditating", etc...) and give to it a default status if nothing happens (e.g. "Sleeper")?
That way perhaps it would be easy to create a query similar to the "Zero reply threads" to give people a list of really recent threads that are still waiting for an answer.
Something like that.... don't know... .
Cheers

The problem with that is there are many old threads here that were dealt with long before marking them as Solved was possible.

On occasion I do see old threads resurrected that I initiated and mark them as Resolved because of it but I've never gone back to mark all my ancient threads thusly.

Perhaps you've never gone back to those ancient threads because you've never been "reminded" by emails from this site telling you that they were still open/pending/unresolved/waiting-for-something-to-happen?

Possibly but if I suddenly got emails about threads from when I joined in 2005 until now I'd likely block it as spam. :eek:

here is a good example of why sometimes a thread needs to be updated

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5/#post4828205

This was not a VERY old thread ,but the program in question has gone through some very significant changes
qt3 and gtk2 gui to a QT4 gui


and a search here , for the program,pops up the post .