Is there any way that we could have really old posts just locked on their own?

If a post doesn't receive any activity for a year or two, it seems to me that it ought to be just auto-locked to spare us all the necroposting. In the case where it's an actual useful post, chances are that we've all forgotten what was in the original thread anyways and a nice new thread would help keep track.

Or if that's not good enough, it would be nice to have some indication that it's a necropost other than having to look at the relatively small grey date which is inconveniently located.

Also, friends don't let friends engage in necroposting.

I generally agree though I've found myself provoking the necromancers the past couple days. :D
What can I say, sometimes it's funny...
But yes, it's silly and not very beneficial.

Devils advocate here: Except for the past few days, has it really been a problem?

Forgetting what was in an old thread can be remedied by reading the thread. :-)

Nah, that sounds like a bad idea. There are some threads that are valid to revive (especially in game specific forums). Also, there's a bunch of classic threads that need to stay open, no matter how long it's been since they were last active - such as the "What is this game?" thread.

Perhaps locking old threads should only relate to things that are really out of date - eg. rumour threads about game announcements from years ago or giveaways that are loooong over.

Hm, maybe giveaway threads should be locked once they are over.

I think I agree, necroing is usually unneeded.
I would exclude game subforums and stickied threads, however.

P.S: fall insomnia thread.. ..LOL

They can always unlock them if there's a genuine need. For every one thread where there's a genuine need to go back and post there's dozens that have no such need. The ratio is a bit better when it comes to threads that get necroed versus ones that have a legitimate need, but even there you're talking about a minority of the posts. The posts where there's a genuine need are much less likely to go a year or more without anybody posting in them at all.

Even just adding code to the software to warn people that it's a necro thread would be welcomed. I don't want to waste my time going into a thread that's dead because some wiseacre thought it was cool to post some trivial tripe at the end and drag people into an old post.

Really what we need is some actual moderation, things like this wouldn't be an issue if there would be moderation. We have 1 subforum to do basically everything, and a lot of people don't seem to care, even the slightest about keeping things neat. Subfora are a different issue. Those probably need to be combined as they'll regularly go a year or more without any activity in them. But, presumably, they could set different rules for the other subfora. The main forum is where most of this sort of thing crops up.

But hey now, it's an internet forum. You start keeping things too neat, you'll have to ban 50% of the users for not falling into specification. I'd say if it does not become a real problem, meaning people bringing back dead threads so much that we can't really keep up with things that matter (forum under zombie attack), we can at least appreciate some of the humor.

You had a very good recommendation though: the forum could add a warning if people try to bump an inactive thread. But let them do it anyway. After all, there could be a legitimate reason.

I've never found that the age of the first post in a thread affected whether the last post was a waste of my time. Sometimes the first post is itself a waste of time, especially if it needlessly duplicates the topic of another thread. As the Buddha said, all is suffering/unsatisfactoriness.

I suggest a compromise: threads can be autolocked when the last post is older than the oldest game sold on GOG. :-P

Well, also this seems a good enough solution.

lol this!

I'm not really being unreasonable here. I'm not talking about having every post meticulously tagged, placed in the correct subforum and properly cross-referenced. That would be nuts. I'm talking about people not necroposting.

If 50% of the people here can't be bothered to do that, then I think we have a cultural problem that GOG needs to deal with. In practice, it's less than a percent of the people here that engage in that sort of activity and it's certainly something that would stop completely if they had to actually ask before necroing excessively old posts.

Hmm, looks like GOG fixed the notification bug for TW2 too soon. ;-P

IMO we probably shouldn't lock old posts. I haven't seen a ton of old threads get necro'd with inane comments or irrelevant remarks (at least at GOG). I've seen threads in some of the game specific forums that had asked about technical issues with no solutions. If someone comes up or finds a solution and it's not posted, they wouldn't be able to post if the thread is locked. Also a relevant issue may have progressed or changed in the general forum.

I think old threads that are still relevant are better than trying to recreate a new thread on the same issue. It helps to keep things categorized and allows the forum members to see how the issue progressed. I understand some information (such as technical and commentary) may be outdated and not useful hence I have an alternative solution.

In the event a thread is brought back after X amount of time is passed, all new posts in the thread will have a new color. So say we have a post on topic xyz and no one comments on the thread for say 6+ months. If someone posts to the thread past 6 months, the post appears as normal but now has a header that is different colored than grey so we can distinguish it from old posts (we can make it green or blue or whatever). All new posts will have this new color in the header bar (the bar on your post that has the date). After no new posts for another 6 months, the header bar for all those formerly new posts will revert to grey instead of blue (since they are no longer new posts). If someone were to post 6 months after that, the header would be the "brought thread back" color we established previously.