Recently I was looking around the forums and I saw an interesting thread that had been closed by one of the moderators on the grounds of necromancy. (I don't want to be more specific here because I am not lodging a specific complaint. If I were, I would have simply PM'ed this moderator.) On the face of it, the decision was completely unimpeachable. The thread had lain dormant for several weeks, and so the decision to post a new reply to it certainly did qualify as necromancy. End of discussion.
But this got me to thinking -- what exactly is the harm with necromancy? I completely understand and agree with objections to thread necromancy on the grounds of spamming, for example. If someone goes around simply posting a reply to every old thread in a forum, not only does that mess up the prioritization of threads that people are actually interested in and push those threads down the list, it also confuses a reader's sense of the current status of a game. This is related to a second issue with thread necromancy, namely that it can raise issues that are no longer current. Imagine resurrecting a thread from CKII, for example, from 6 or 7 (!) dlc's ago. What value does such a thread bring to where the game is now?
All this granted, yet I do not see here a compelling argument against resurrecting any and all threads. For example, what about the case of a thread that featured an active discussion of a topic that has fallen dormant for a month or so and now someone wants to take up again? Yes of course one can start a new thread and post a link to the old thread. But really is that preferable to re-opening the original thread, in which case a reader can more easily refer to the context of the discussion without crossing back and forth between two different threads?
This prompts me to offer a suggestion: might moderators be given license to exercise some discretion when they detect a case of necromancy, closing it down when the discussion cannot serve any useful conceivable purpose but allowing it to go forward where the discussion still has currency? Perhaps the mod could post something in "modcolors" to the effect that the thread has been called back from the dead and people posting in it should be made aware of that fact.
But this got me to thinking -- what exactly is the harm with necromancy? I completely understand and agree with objections to thread necromancy on the grounds of spamming, for example. If someone goes around simply posting a reply to every old thread in a forum, not only does that mess up the prioritization of threads that people are actually interested in and push those threads down the list, it also confuses a reader's sense of the current status of a game. This is related to a second issue with thread necromancy, namely that it can raise issues that are no longer current. Imagine resurrecting a thread from CKII, for example, from 6 or 7 (!) dlc's ago. What value does such a thread bring to where the game is now?
All this granted, yet I do not see here a compelling argument against resurrecting any and all threads. For example, what about the case of a thread that featured an active discussion of a topic that has fallen dormant for a month or so and now someone wants to take up again? Yes of course one can start a new thread and post a link to the old thread. But really is that preferable to re-opening the original thread, in which case a reader can more easily refer to the context of the discussion without crossing back and forth between two different threads?
This prompts me to offer a suggestion: might moderators be given license to exercise some discretion when they detect a case of necromancy, closing it down when the discussion cannot serve any useful conceivable purpose but allowing it to go forward where the discussion still has currency? Perhaps the mod could post something in "modcolors" to the effect that the thread has been called back from the dead and people posting in it should be made aware of that fact.
- 2
.
