Necro-Thread Questions

bken1234 said:

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FindingHeart8 said:

Brigby said:

Mburn7 said:

-snip / already answered-

2.  Why is this rule a thing?  I feel like its more confusing to create a new post on a topic than it is to just keep an old one going.

Some have already answered this, but we have this rule for a couple of reasons:

1. Avoiding Information That's No Longer Relevant/True - Since MtGPQ is a live game, it's no surprise that things may change. For example, discussions talking about event rewards or objectives may no longer be accurate anymore, considering the changes to some of them in 2.7.1. We want to avoid confusing situations where a player, especially one new to the game,is in our forum and starts reading a bumped post that contains incorrect or misleading information.
2. Preventing Spam - Sometimes a discussion just doesn't seem to gain much traction or interest, and that's ok! What isn't ok though is continuously bumping your old thread to the front, just to try and get more people to look at it and comment. This is unfair to other forum contributors that want an equal and fair amount of time in the spotlight.
   

Mburn7 said:

3.  If it is so wrong to post in an old thread, why are they left open?  It shouldn't be too hard to have a program that automatically closes a thread after 30 days (Just have something that checks whatever qualifying date is the answer to question 1 and if its over 30 days it closes the thread.).

-snip / already answered-

That's unfortunately not a built-in function we have currently available to us, however that concept makes 100% sense and I would love to have that feature available. I'll be sure to inquire with the web developers we work with about seeing if there is a way to automatically close a discussion thread, if there aren't any new comments posted within the last 30 days.

I get what you're saying Brigby, and those sound like good reasons for circumstantial situations where it would be understandable to shut down a thread.  However, as is, we have an inflexible rule that applies to all threads, where it's more of a barrier to conversation than a positive addition.

Loosening the reins on this rule (and other rules I would argue) would have a greater positive effect on the community overall, than keeping them as strict as they are to contend with these fringe situations.

Where do you draw the line though? Why is it ok to follow some rules and break others?

I'm honestly wondering. I could see as a mod, warning someone for an insult (rule 7) and getting pushback because I didn't uphold rule 11 a few days before, so I'm wondering how you would see this working. 

The part that I've been bitten by before, accidentally, was other people pointing to old threads and me then reading and commenting because I didn't know they were old! They were relevant and they were pointed to now.

Auto-lock (archive is a better word) is a required feature, that would've avoided my issues.

Just a note at the end "This thread has been automatically archived due to lack of activity in the last 30 days."

And I _strongly_ suspect that while the feature doesn't exist someone should be able to write (and test) a script in less than a day to do this to the forum database and set it up on a cron-job. RoboMod!

TomB said:

These guys are having trouble fixing buggy cards - you really want them messing around in the forum code?

Brigby said:

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FindingHeart8 said:

TomB said:

These guys are having trouble fixing buggy cards - you really want them messing around in the forum code?

I would suspect that it would be D3's tech crew working on the forum code, instead of Octagon

That being said...I really hope something positive comes of this thread and it doesn't just get swept under the rug.

We work with a 3rd party organization, when it comes to making design/functionality changes to the forum, but yes it would be D3 Go!'s responsibility to work with them to improve the forum software. I will be sure to reach out to them to inquire about an automatic inactive thread closer.

Thank you Brigby.  That would be very helpful