And you need a medal for whining about every single person who necros a thread instead of just ignoring them.
Shouting "don't necro" really doesn't help, and you seem like the kind of person who probably does that.
Also, messaging people that may not have the time to come and respond is a pretty dumb move.
If you want to purge the world of information that could be needed by somebody, I suggest you first go burn a library down.
I find the fact that you want to do away with possible valuable information to be highly annoying.
It's like, "let me just go put all of my most important files onto a single hard drive and then randomly decide to format it without creating backups first"
Sure seems like a great idea!
Alright, alright, let's keep the hostilities to a minimum here, please. We're here to improve the forum, not devolve into mud-slinging when we can't agree on an idea.
Wanderer, it's pretty clear that you're fairly personally invested in protecting old threads, and I respect that. I really do, and to a point, I agree with you - some threads contain useful, beneficial information that the whole community can put to use. Nobody's suggesting we just throw those threads out of the airlock at the slightest sniff of a member's inactivity at all - again, I've offered a reasonable compromise between keeping the clutter to a minimum and preserving threads for the off-chance that their owners will come back to use them in the future.
Let's look at this objectively: it's very rare that anybody on the forum will go looking past the tenth page of threads in any given section. Threads going past that area tend to be hanging around in limbo, with their owners not bumping them and regular members not wanting to break the forum rules by necro-posting in them. Having threads bobbing around in the general sections for years at a time, waiting for their owners to
possibly return, seems like a waste - in the converse to your points, it's like a hoarder wanting to keep something 'just in case', and ending up with an awful lot of junk lying around waiting on a potential purpose that never arrives.
If a member has put together a useful thread with fresh, new information the whole forum can use, the thread should be summed up as a tutorial. However, it makes very little sense to simply grasp at every old thread on the forum and hoard them under the idea that their owners
might one day return to revive them. In the vast majority of cases, their owners never do - threads are started with enthusiasm, members get halfway through their builds, lose interest, and their builds are abandoned, with little to no
new information or techniques imparted to the forum as a whole. In that circumstance, we're keeping a lot of threads with no new substance to them simply on the off-chance.
Let's not forget: threads themselves aren't the only source of information. We're going to be re-constructing the tutorials hosted on this forum and hopefully championing them to remain current and updated. Far better to keep useful information clear, concise and in one place rather than where we currently are ("Use the Search bar!") and hope that members can sift through a mountain of junk to find the answers they want.
Give the old threads a chance to be revived? Yes. I completely agree with this - it's my hope that every build on the 405th is completed and showcased in time. Archive those abandoned threads for a period and give their owners the chance to return and complete them. However, there also needs to be a cut-off point where we as a forum agree that all information is kept relevant, current, and easily-accessible rather than buried under ten or more pages of abandoned threads.
A compromise can be reached here, gentlemen. Let's try to keep the discussion civil.
