A number of threads for plugins on the Community Projects forum have died from necrotizing bacterial infections!

This includes stickied threads such as the Finished Skins and Plugins posts!

Also infected are threads for some widely-used, actively developed plugins! Oh noes!

BUMP. This nonsense is blocking me from updating some of my plugins as well.

Seriously - posting in old threads rarely does any harm, especially there. If an old thread that should stay dead gets brought back, you can always lock it.

Eh, the thread necromancy was a problem before, but 3 months is a bit short.

At least the OP should be able to resurrect a thread.

The necrosis sets in at six months, last I checked (a couple days ago).

How was it a problem before? In what way does bringing back an old thread make your forum experience worse?

The conventional wisdom is that people bump discussions from years and years ago that couldnt possibly be relevant or just write *BUMP* on super old threads to [edited -P] people off.

Also we have very few moderators so there's that.

The trouble is there actually ARE discussions from years ago that are still relevant. The cost of being unable to post in those threads is higher than the cost of someone bringing back an old, irrelevant thread which can be easily locked.

Particularly in Community Projects and Role Playing.

Discussions from years ago really should be paraphrased and started anew with a link to the old discussion. The only places that shouldn't automatically lock threads are the Community Projects, Role-Playing and Off-topic forums. Thread necromancy is always on-topic in Off-topic.

I still don't see how it's a problem anywhere else. The worst problems anyone has described so far are no more than minor annoyances.

I agree but we tend to take the fact that there is only the occasional troll here for granted. I mean people call me and peytros and lecter trolls and whatever, but we're far from actual trashbag trolls that literally do everything in their power to ruin everyone else's use of the forums.

The possibility of someone defacing the historical threads and futzing all the order of history is enough of a reason to leave the thread necromancy.

The stuff with plugins etc.. is not even a forum thing it should be done on the wiki it's just there's no official vendetta-online.com integration of it. If the wiki was better designed and better integrated into the VO site it would be a lot better.

I'd even consider volunteering to do a little bit of web design work to that end (if you have a look I designed a custom sercodominion.org wiki and matching phpBB, so I know my shit) but Incarnate doesn't seem to have the time/care about this part of the website. Not that it's a bad thing, i'd rather he built content also.

The auto-locking to prevent necromancy is fine for the General, Suggestions, and Bugs forums. Though I would argue that it should not apply to sticky threads. For the case in which having replies to a sticky is not desired, a forum moderator can always lock the sticky thread manually.

The anti-necro measures don't make sense for the Community Projects or Role-playing forums (and I could concede off-topic as well), where there can be relevant updates beyond six months. Plus, necromancy has never been much of a problem in those forums anyway.

For community projects especially, it can be annoying to have the discussion split across multiple threads from an organizational point of view. Plus, while the new thread can have a link to the original thread, the bigger issue is that the original thread won't link to the new one since it is locked and uneditable. This is a problem when external links point to the original thread (e.g. a link from vo-wiki).