I have a different view of those in most cases - particularly on large, or publicly accessible, boards. That comment may not contribute anything useful for the people previously involved, but it may very well be useful for everyone else - such as any person that finds the thread through a search engine.
> Like when a user tells others in a 7 years old, obsolete thread they're wrong because shiny new solution XYZ exists.
That's a specific case about one-upping someone much later, but a more generalized case - posting modern solution under unresolved problem thread - is very valuable for people who find the thread looking for a solution. Conversely, blanket ban on "necroposting" discourages accumulation of knowledge on tough problems.
See also: https://xkcd.com/979/
I think this suggests two things:
1. There is an opportunity for better tooling. I'm thinking something like those annoying infinite scroll news/blog sites, where you reach the end of the article and it dynamically sticks another one on the page below (& updates the url). Imagine that but with any bug that's been marked as a duplicate (which the bug reporter should be able to do). Now you get the best of both worlds -- a way to view the new post with or without context.
2. Necro-ing would be less problematic if bug tracking were less centralized. More long, support-type bugs between distributors and users, where is preferable to log a new issue than necro an old one; more short summaries of confirmed bugs submitted by maintainers to the upstream repo. GitLab's separation of issues and epics is a good idea here, although their implementation is awkward at best.
That's a good point I haven't considered. Yeah, the consequence of mistakenly starting a new topic under an unrelated old thread is that the new discussion is now miscategorized and harder to find.
> It can still link to the old issue in order to keep the chain intact.
Yes, that would be great. If one could pull off an UI that nudged people to correctly link back to older threads, so that such links were typical, I think it would mostly solve the necropost problem - the etiquette could be changed to "don't necropost; if starting a new thread on a topic that was discussed in the past, ensure your post links back to those old discussions".
(I think I saw a few boards automatically generating a box with "related topics", but IIRC, their method of finding related topics yielded lots of false positives. If improved, this could work too, though I would still prefer explicit links that don't change over time.)
> I'm thinking something like those annoying infinite scroll news/blog sites, where you reach the end of the article and it dynamically sticks another one on the page below (& updates the url).
I personally don't want that. I hate this UI pattern. In particular:
- As implemented on social media platforms, it makes it nearly impossible to find your way back to something you saw a minute ago but scrolled past.
- As implemented on news sites, auto-appended articles are usually not relevant to the one you just finished.
- The URL substitution is particularly annoying - usually, the time I care about the URL is when I read/skim the article to the end, and then decide to share or bookmark it. At that point, the URL will already be changed to point to a different article, and it's easy to miss. And the way these feeds are implemented, if you follow the link to a follow-up article and scroll up, you won't get back the article you actually wanted.
The reason the term exists is because it's a blanket rule based on the age of the reply, not based on the intent or context.
The generally recommended alternative is to make a new thread and simply link to the old one so you don't confuse people.
