PoolCleaningRobot said:
Given the wording "reopening a thread", I thought the idea was to continue an old discussion with valuable posts rather than make a whole new thread for the topic you want to discuss. There isn't a whole lot of point in just adding a quick comment, all the site rules are centered around creating a discussion. And hey, its their job. Its not like glancing at thread/PM and posting "This thread reopened" takes very long
A post can add to the discussion and be quick, ya know!
(By quick, I'm referring to two or three sentence posts rather than stuff that'd normally be classified as low-content anyways)
Anyways, I'm one of those guys that doesn't like involving mods if it can be reasonably avoided and considers bothering them over something as minor as this to be a waste of their time / efforts. When mods have much bigger issues like keeping close eyes on highly-controversial threads or removing bot posts with hidden links in them, having to get them to take time out of their day just to let someone post in an old thread (which would probably involve hearing the poster out and evaluating the legitimacy of their claim) comes across as frivolous to me. As I've said before, I don't see how necroing threads inherently harms discussion in any way, hence why I view bothering mods over it as pointless.
Lastly (for now - I could go on, but laziness and a desire to be brief win out here), there's the issue of people constantly making new threads over age-old topics that often end up going down the exact same paths as those before it.
Then whats the point in necroing a thread at all? If its all been said before then people should just lurk through old posts. I don't think letting people open old threads would change that. If people are mulling something over in their mind like the ME3 controversy they're going to start a thread about it anyway. I doubt many people want post in threads that are longer than 3 or 4 pages anyway. I read a sociology paper that stated many threads are simply carried by a few people who posted first so at some point your posts simply get lost in someone else's conversation. When it comes to shit storms, most are over in a month anyway so you can feel free to post in any thread even if its a few weeks old
Look at it this way: Would it be better to have people repeating the same thing over and over again in forty different threads, or just two? Personally, I'd much rather have the latter as it'd at least contain the conversation better and discourages people from flooding the forums with countless renditions of the same topic, plus it gives people reason to check and see if someone has already said the same thing that they were going to say (possibly in a better way than they themselves could have).
As for the shit-storms, it is true that most end up over within a month. However, the Escapist (and probably other forums as well) has this cyclic tendency where certain topics come back every so often in droves and new threads on said topics flood the boards like crazy. Encouraging people to go back to previous threads that already discussed that exact topic would hopefully cause people to look at the massive size of a thread and ask themselves if they could actually add something new to the discussion, hopefully ending the cycle or at least encouraging the conversation to go somewhere other than in circles.
