Old Threads

[sarahG]

I realise it's sometimes a hard choice to make, whether to close old threads when they've not been posted on for say X months (or whether vBulletin can even do it), but being able to reply to threads 14 months old, digging up old threads with what are now mainly irrelevant comments (eg. http://www.bloggingtips.com/forums/showthread.php?t=185 about reviewing a blog in Sept 2007) is perhaps not a great idea?

Maybe it's just boredom on a Sunday afternoon, but thought this could be considered to set threads to auto close after say 6 months of inactivity? We have a reasonable amount of active threads and to be honest in such a fast paced environment like the web, most of these older threads don't really need their discussions continuing as usually the original info or topic is outdated anyway.

Just my 2c after going back in time for several posts!

[Indyan]

I am a moderator in a pretty large forum. There bumping a thread without justification is prohibited. But we dont have auto-close as sometimes an old thread may be relevent.
Since, the forum is small enough I think manual moderation for now is the best option.

[Kevin]

It can be a problem in a newish forum such as this one but the more threads has the less it should happen.

Vbulletin can show posts from the last month, year or from the start of the forums life. I prefer to list posts from the start of the forums life when a forum is new because it shows more threads to the user and should increase participation.

I prefer to keep threads open incase someone has a genuine question but what we can do is keep the threads open but if someone posts in a very old thread which is now irrelevent, we will then close the thread. For example, if someone replied to a year old thread regarding last years PR update.

[akira07]

hmmm some member already tell me to not bumping old thread and i'm understand it...
the reason is "why bumping old thread which maybe the real author is not need it anymore", yes i can understand it...

But for general topic which never expired like "free template site", is that never expired? If i have new list of free template site, why i can't post it in that thread? It's better than to make new thread...because it'll be suspected as duplicating thread. Well, it's dillema for me.

So i think it's better to make clear rules about it, for example :

bumping old thread which expired is unallowed
expired definition and explanation : .................................................. .....

[Kevin]

hmmm some member already tell me to not bumping old thread and i'm understand it...
the reason is "why bumping old thread which maybe the real author is not need it anymore", yes i can understand it...

But for general topic which never expired like "free template site", is that never expired? If i have new list of free template site, why i can't post it in that thread? It's better than to make new thread...because it'll be suspected as duplicating thread. Well, it's dillema for me.

So i think it's better to make clear rules about it, for example :

bumping old thread which expired is unallowed
expired definition and explanation : .................................................. .....

In this situation I think a new thread is better. I don't think we need to have one thread for templates, one thread for google, one thread for hosting etc. Generally speaking you should start a new topic if you have something to write or say.

Sarah asked this question because of this thread (http://www.bloggingtips.com/forums/showthread.php?t=185). Someone asked a short question without providing details and a year later someone responded. Clearly this is the kind of thing we want to avoid (check out the thread to see what I mean) :)

[navjotjsingh]

Checking here...what about these?
http://www.bloggingtips.com/forums/showthread.php?t=191 - Would user be interested now? Maybe blog has already changed a lot in past 1 year.
http://www.bloggingtips.com/forums/showthread.php?t=136 - Just saying same thing over - no addition even in terms of url being specified. - Possible sources from where article copied: http://www.westnet.net.au/public_html/search.php , http://www.seoinnovation.com/seo/search-engines.htm , http://websoa.com/searchEngineList.php
http://www.bloggingtips.com/forums/showthread.php?t=157 - Maybe the poster has learned now using it
http://www.bloggingtips.com/forums/showthread.php?t=191 - Author interested after 1 year in reviews?
http://www.bloggingtips.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29 - Same problem
http://www.bloggingtips.com/forums/showthread.php?t=138 - Useless post

DP forums use a plugin or sort of hack where a thread's date of starting is shown at the forum main page. Should be used here too to identify clear cases of 1+ year thread bumping.

Even if you are adding something to it, sometimes thread value has lost across such a long time period unless its a thread which is being run by user contribution...like a thread of constant posted resources abt something. Though here also long time gaps kill the thread's charm of posting again after long time.

[Kevin]

Those threads were reopened by kocharvimal. I get the impression he was searching through all posts and didn't think about the time.

I've installed a plugin which automatically closes threads after a set number of days. I've set it to 200...do you think I should decrease this to 100 or perhaps less?

[navjotjsingh]

Seems this plugin is not working? The posts I mentioned are still open.

[ap4a]

Seems this plugin is not working? The posts I mentioned are still open.

They've been posted to recently, so the plugin won't (can't) close them.

[navjotjsingh]

OOps...sorry to act so stupid...sometimes my mind just shuts down! :D

[ap4a]

It's not stupid, it happens to all of us at times :)

[Kevin]

so are you guys happy with 200 days? As I said, I can change this to any number :)

[sarahG]

200 days sounds fine to me.

As I said, I realise it's hard. It's the same with comments, do you close comments after X months as a lot are not relevant after a certain period, but then others are. Ideally a bit of common sense should be used but overly enthusiastic new members can forget that at times!

[Kevin]

200 days sounds fine to me.

As I said, I realise it's hard. It's the same with comments, do you close comments after X months as a lot are not relevant after a certain period, but then others are. Ideally a bit of common sense should be used but overly enthusiastic new members can forget that at times!

yeah. With comments the main worry is spam, legitimate comments aren't really a concern in my opinion. Most of the trackback spam I get is on older posts.

[slee]

is there not a way to turn off trackbacks but not comments?

[Donace]

is there not a way to turn off trackbacks but not comments?

don't think there are 'trackbacks' for forums :p but even if they were I think a total shutdown of old threads is better; a) no spamming at a later date, b) retains PR juice, c) keeps ranking in serps constant.

[sarahG]

don't think there are 'trackbacks' for forums :p

I think the conversation moved onto blogs, sorry, my fault for bringing up the subject of comments!

is there not a way to turn off trackbacks but not comments?

Yes there is, although I only know the phpMyAdmin way! You could select a specific post and turn them off via the Write/Edit post screen under the advanced options. I used to use a plugin called comment control that I think allowed you to turn off trackbacks and/or comments (definitely comments). WP 2.7 allows you to turn off comments after a certain number of months, I don't know if you can specify trackbacks and comments or just comments.

yeah. With comments the main worry is spam, legitimate comments aren't really a concern in my opinion.

Depends on the post subject. I get comments on my old tutorial type posts, PHP, WordPress etc, and those are fine as they're usually still relevant. However, I've also had comments on posts that were perhaps talking about umm a PR update 2 years ago, or when we were moving house last year (just examples!), and now comments on those are not so relevant!

[navjotjsingh]

don't think there are 'trackbacks' for forums :p but even if they were I think a total shutdown of old threads is better; a) no spamming at a later date, b) retains PR juice, c) keeps ranking in serps constant.

Just for information...Trackbacks is possible in forums... vbseo plugin can achieve that in vbulletin. Not only trackbacks but pingbacks too.

[Donace]

@navjot interesting...but surely tracbacks/pingbacks as they are not shown/linked at forum level don't cause an issue?