Resurrecting old threads that are still on topic.

[Railgun]

More often than not, I see threads being resurrected that are some years old, and being closed, citing it's an old thread, so start a new one.

As a site admin elsewhere, this seems pretty contradictory to good site management, forum database management, and for the end user, good search result relevance.

Instead of a thread that goes nowhere, and is simply closed, why are they not allowed to live? What's the point of having another thread on the same topic exist? This is one of the reasons search results are convoluted at best; because the relevance of these results are all over the place and it makes things that more difficult to find what you're looking for.

So I'm curious to know the mindset of the mods when doing this. Can some better thought be put into simply whacking threads that are actually relevant? Who cares if they're old.

 

[ViRGE]

Honestly it depends on the thread and what's in it. If someone bumps a thread but adds something extremely relevant and meaningful to it, we probably won't close it. But if it's a bump just to say thank you, then we usually will.

The reason we do this is that the posters here have shown time and time again that they can't read the date, so if an ancient thread is bumped up, they'll respond to it like it's new, which is a waste of everyone's time.

 

[Railgun]

Perhaps I just happen to catch those that seem relevant...but this one for example...

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2253372

Though two years old, the questions brought up still seem relevant given we've not yet seen the tech.

As for the rest, would it be safe to say that, say, every few months, auto-close tickets that are 12mo or longer old with no updates?