devtrackers.gg
TLDR: Guidelines and prohibitions against "necroing" old threads are more likely than not lead to wasting the time of other readers due to information fragmentation. Ignore these and instead 1) carefully consider what your topic really is, 2) post to existing threads, no matter how old, when they are truly on your topic, and 3) start new threads for actually new topics rather than adding to recent threads just because that wouldn't be a "necro." More generally, consider the future reader and how he will find information, rather than following arbitrary rules.
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"Necro" is an English prefix derived from the Ancient Greek word [i]νεκρός[i] (nekrós, "dead") and used to create words relating to death. In the context of Internet forums it means "adding a post to a very old thread," presumably with the implication that the thread topic was "dead." This is apparently seen as undesirable by some.
The first misleading thing about this is that a thread topic clearly isn't dead if someone's wanting to make further posts about it. So the guideline against necroing threads is basically saying, "split a topic into multiple threads if it lasts for a long time and has large time gaps between some posts, but not if it doesn't have large time gaps between some posts. On the face of it that doesn't make a lot of sense, but it might be considered just a convention if it did no harm otherwise. Unfortunately, that convention is not harmless.
Let's consider a not-uncommon situation such as the one I encountered recently, where I didn't understand how the "repair up to 100%" part of Clutch and Perfect Clutch talents worked.
There are several ways to search for threads that might have an explanation.
In this particular case, though I eventually found the right answer, one of the first answers I came across (the one I linked in point 1 above) was incorrect, stating that Clutch was buggy. (None of the posters on that thread understood how it worked.) Obviously other people doing this search are also likely to receive a link to this incorrect information. They may either read just that link, in which case they have the same or worse problem (not understanding how it works and thinking that there's a bug where there isn't), or read or at least see it along with other links and waste time dealing with "noise" in their search.
There are several ways to deal with this situation when you discover it.
All this is probably fairly obvious if you take the approach of asking, "How are future readers going to find and use this information?" rather than blindly following arbitrary rules. Thinking about things in terms of topics, rather than age, is also more likely to lead you to the correct decision in cases where you should start a new thread. For example, say a talent was changed in a release one or two days ago. Even if there's a currently active thread on the old version of that talent (and thus posting there wouldn't be a necro), it would still be better to start a new thread for "[Talent] in TU[new release]," rather than continue the old one, since a different version of the talent is effectively a different topic.
This is why, in the post I linked above, I took option 4, and why you should generally do this too, despite the guideline or prohibition against "necroing" posts. Don't waste the time of other readers and searchers by disconnecting related information.
Further discussion and thoughts (but not flames) are welcome, of course.
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"Necro" is an English prefix derived from the Ancient Greek word [i]νεκρός[i] (nekrós, "dead") and used to create words relating to death. In the context of Internet forums it means "adding a post to a very old thread," presumably with the implication that the thread topic was "dead." This is apparently seen as undesirable by some.
The first misleading thing about this is that a thread topic clearly isn't dead if someone's wanting to make further posts about it. So the guideline against necroing threads is basically saying, "split a topic into multiple threads if it lasts for a long time and has large time gaps between some posts, but not if it doesn't have large time gaps between some posts. On the face of it that doesn't make a lot of sense, but it might be considered just a convention if it did no harm otherwise. Unfortunately, that convention is not harmless.
Let's consider a not-uncommon situation such as the one I encountered recently, where I didn't understand how the "repair up to 100%" part of Clutch and Perfect Clutch talents worked.
There are several ways to search for threads that might have an explanation.
- Type "clutch" into the box under "Search Forum" (leaving the default "Show Threads" radio button selected). This produces 50 pages of results, with the post "do anyone see prefect clutch talent to repair 100% or more than 20%" at the top (as of this writing), and no other threads obviously related to Clutch on the first results page. (I don't recall where it appeared in the results of my original search, but it was high in them.) These results appear to show threads mentioning Clutch with the ones with more recent replies higher.
- Use "Advanced Search" to search titles for "clutch" in the "The Division 2" forum, showing results as threads. Results can be sorted in various ways, but the default is by last posting date in descending order. This produces four pages of results (between 31 and 40 threads).
- Do a Google or similar search, which will bring up forum threads amongst its other results in arbitrary order depending on, among other things, external links to posts.
In this particular case, though I eventually found the right answer, one of the first answers I came across (the one I linked in point 1 above) was incorrect, stating that Clutch was buggy. (None of the posters on that thread understood how it worked.) Obviously other people doing this search are also likely to receive a link to this incorrect information. They may either read just that link, in which case they have the same or worse problem (not understanding how it works and thinking that there's a bug where there isn't), or read or at least see it along with other links and waste time dealing with "noise" in their search.
There are several ways to deal with this situation when you discover it.
- Just leave it alone, thus causing others doing a similar search in the future to waste time in the same way.
- Post a new thread in order to avoid necroing the old thread, which may or may not make the situation marginally better. The old thread with the incorrect answer is still there, and still with results of unknown ranking linking to it from various search engines. Further, you've added to the noise future searchers have to deal with since they may be getting yet another search result to examine.
- Add the correct information to the old thread. This avoids increasing noise and someone reading that thread with incorrect information gets the correct information at the end. However, this splits discussion across several threads (if there were others) without letting others see that there was already further previous discussion about the feature.
- Note the incorrect information in the old thread and link to the best thread for discussion. This has all the advantages of the method above, and also helps those seeking further information and discussion by putting a link to that right in front of them, and hopefully redirects discussion to one thread that will eventually get top ranking in search engines.
All this is probably fairly obvious if you take the approach of asking, "How are future readers going to find and use this information?" rather than blindly following arbitrary rules. Thinking about things in terms of topics, rather than age, is also more likely to lead you to the correct decision in cases where you should start a new thread. For example, say a talent was changed in a release one or two days ago. Even if there's a currently active thread on the old version of that talent (and thus posting there wouldn't be a necro), it would still be better to start a new thread for "[Talent] in TU[new release]," rather than continue the old one, since a different version of the talent is effectively a different topic.
This is why, in the post I linked above, I took option 4, and why you should generally do this too, despite the guideline or prohibition against "necroing" posts. Don't waste the time of other readers and searchers by disconnecting related information.
Further discussion and thoughts (but not flames) are welcome, of course.
