Once in a while we get people with not much experience with netiquette or reading forum rules inappropriately necro-ing threads over half a year old. This would prevent that problem, and still allow for relevant discussion.
Locking a month after the most recent post would be ideal, though if it’s easier to implement locking a month after the first post, it wouldn’t be a disaster.
I can think of a thread or two where a month would be too early to lock it, so maybe two months?
I can think of a number of threads where this wouldn’t be ideal. Is it really that bad to just have a necroed post every few months and tell the person not to do it again?
Can you give me an example or two of a thread like that?
I’ve seen a focus on locking threads as a general practice by the mods specifically to eliminate spamming the rest of us. The forum rules are pretty old school on netiquette. So yes, I do have reason to believe some mods and older users may think it is that bad.
Anyhoo, I’m less interested in discussing how bad it is, because whether it’s worth it is up to the mods to decide. I’m more interested in knowing whether my suggestion is bad because there are a number of threads that it would be bad for, so please link a few for me (or others?) to consider.
Well all of the blog update threads would have to be excepted, but that shouldn’t be too hard I imagine- Rules Q&A already has separate thread-locking rules. The bigger issue is that different threads remain relevant for differing amounts of time. Most threads could probably be locked after just a few days, and anything after that would be considered a necro. But sometimes there’s good reason to go back and make a post on an older thread- an answer finally recieved to a question that was asked, an update to a project, etc.
This is ultimately up to the Forum Moderators, who are their own distinct group from the MagicJudges.org Developers. We wouldn’t make a technical change to how the forums are moderated without their buy-in, so I’ve passed the suggestion on to them
I think it’s unlikely that we’ll choose to do this automatically, for the reasons that Isaac described - different forums would need different behavior, and I really don’t want to add more special rules for different types of forums, they’re already complicated enough. The last time we discussed this, we came up with a suggestion of locking any threads that aren’t actively being discussed whenever there’s a document update, to keep discussions based on old policy separate from new policy. We’ll brainstorm other ideas as well. If we decide to make a change to the moderation policy, I’ll try to update this thread - but in the mean time, I’m happy to hear additional suggestions or discussion here.