Why exactly is posting in an old thread bad?

[Ghaleon]

I've always wondered the purpose of that rule

Reviving old/dead threads is disruptive and often serves little purpose.  It's far better off to start a new thread than to revive an older thread that has seen little or no activity in the past week or so.  If it's something dealing directly with the old thread, start a new one and link to the old one.

What exactly makes making a new legitimate post in an old thread more disruptive than making a new one? Is it so that people who saw the old thread already don't have to sift thru all the old posts to find what page exactly where the new ones start? That's the best reason I can come up with. But I'm wondering if there are more/other reasons. I rekon making new threads would add to the server load more (though very little).

[helvetica]

The database and the forum software itself is optimized to keep the most active topics cached and in an easy to access manner.  Writing threads is an extremely expensive process compared to reading, especially as topics tend to age and things get disorganized.  The database stores individual posts and then a list of threads the posts belong to, and when it updates a thread it has to read each of these individual posts and assemble a thread with it.

When you bump an old thread like that, you end up pulling a bunch of posts that were otherwise dormant and archived back into an active state.  The forum software is going to grab all the posts from that thread and cache them under the expectation that they may get accessed again, when likely they won't.  Reads don't do this (except on the very first time a thread is read) because the final output was already made and since it hasn't changed it can just reuse that.  This is why when you post it seems to take a long time, yet clicking on a thread and just reading doesn't.  Little data is actually sent (text is ridiculously small bandwidth wise), it's the time spent having to rebuild the thread view that takes a while.

It's better to just make a new thread, and link to the old one if you have something relevant to add.  Only bumps we allow are status update bumps from the OP for things like project threads.

[Ghaleon]

I see thanks, I was wondering that for over a year!

Edit:
Sometimes I post in threads that say they are old, but they are still on the first page, is this still bad or are first page threads autocached or whatever?

[helvetica]

It's still bad because the database sorts strictly by post date and activity of the thread its attached to.  It doesn't care if it's on the front page of a particular forum.

After 14 days unless it's something substantial we'd prefer for you to make a new thread.  If it's over 30 definitely make a new thread, period.

[Dizzy H. "Muffin" Muffin]

Random thought: auto-locking threads when they hit 30 days old. I can think of a few reasons why that would create more problems than it would solve, though.

[Matsuri]

Random thought: auto-locking threads when they hit 30 days old. I can think of a few reasons why that would create more problems than it would solve, though.

That has been brought up before, and has been shot down every time for the very reason of 'creating more problems than it would solve'. If those problems weren't an issue, I think it'd be a good idea, but that really isn't the case. :/

[Nobu]

Create more problems than it solves. I can only imagine how much fun that would be to code, too. :V MATSY OUR WAVELENGTHS ARE BACK :]

[Matsuri]

Heh.

[Dizzy H. "Muffin" Muffin]

....

Exactly.

[helvetica]

Random thought: auto-locking threads when they hit 30 days old. I can think of a few reasons why that would create more problems than it would solve, though.

Eventually I will have an archiving system together to do such a thing but for now it's not really necessary, we're not at a point where having threads like that being bumped cause a noticeably adverse effect on performance.

[Dizzy H. "Muffin" Muffin]

Gotcha.

[capt. h]

What about in Patchouli's Scarlet Library, where an old story can lie dormant for weeks or even a couple months between chapters?

[helvetica]

If it's a self-bump for a thread update then that's considered acceptable.  Project updates in RaNGE or story updates in PSL are considered ok.

What isn't acceptable is bumping a long dead thread with an irrelevant question or a question to an OP who may or may not be around anymore.

[Infy♫]

thanks for the clarification, i've been wondering this as well..