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Tanaric

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May 11, 2016
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Hey folks,

I see you have a well-intentioned warning against posting in very old threads. This seems to be a relic of "no necroposting" culture that's been around since BBS days.

This cultural quirk made a lot of sense back then, but is obsolete with the invention and refinement of the search engine. In the old days, forums were navigated by browsing them directly and looking at subjects. Nowadays, if a person lands on a year- (or decade-) old thread, it's because a search engine dropped them there.

Like it or not, that means that thread is the most relevant place for whatever query got them there, and it's the right place to continue discussion. Countless other folks searching for the same question will land on the same ancient forum thread, and that thread is a whole lot more useful if there are current responses to it.

I request that you remove the nag message against necroposting, or at least reword it to make it not seem like a bad idea. This change will (over time) increase the discoverability of information for all of your games with very little downside.

Cordially,
 
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Like it or not, that means that thread is the most relevant place for whatever query got them there
Unfortunately your argument relies on the assumption that search engines are good metrics of relevance, and that's a faulty assumption.

The best way to get a high search rank is a large number of inbound links, which does not measure relevance in any meaningful way, especially not when wrong answers generate more replies -- and each reply is an inbound link.
 
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It's also a problem between the theory and the reality of forum usage.

Theory

Necromancer: I have the answer.

Adoring fans: *adore*

Reality

Necromancer: Does someone else have the answer?

Reply to 5-year-old-post: That's not how the game works.

Well-meaning-user: Necro!

Reply to a different 5-year-old-post: Wow how could you be so wrong?

Less well-meaning-user: Wow, can't you all see this is like a million years old?

Other user: Is this the oldest necro ever?

&c
 
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Unfortunately your argument relies on the assumption that search engines are good metrics of relevance, and that's a faulty assumption.

The best way to get a high search rank is a large number of inbound links, which does not measure relevance in any meaningful way, especially not when wrong answers generate more replies -- and each reply is an inbound link.
Your entire reply misses the point. If someone is seeing the necroposting warnings, how they got there is irrelevant. Abstractly, there is no way to link to "the most recent thread about army composition in EU4", so whichever thread about that concept that gets picked up and shared -- whether by search engines, other forum posts, pinned discord messages, word of mouth, or whatever -- will be the place people get sent for information about a topic and is therefore the best place to continue talking about that thing.

I brought up search engines to relate my specific impetus for posting this thread, not to get into a discussion on the pros and cons of various page ranking techniques. But since I worked at Google for many years as a software engineer, I feel qualified to respond anyway.

Firstly, you're wrong about how each reply to a thread artificially inflates its page ranking based on self-referential inbound links. That kind of trick hasn't worked for about a decade, maybe longer.

Secondly, since we're talking specifically about posts on this forum, a large number of inbound links does actually measure relevance pretty well. Especially links from outside of the forum, which are valued significantly more highly in traditional page ranking. This means not only will that forum post be landed on for queries that match up well, but also by people using whatever resource links to the forum post (reddit guides, YouTube description links, pinned discord messages, etc.).

Unless you're arguing that nefarious forces are using SEO techniques to artificially inflate search engine rankings for specific threads, this line of reasoning does not apply in this context. It applies only to the strengths and weaknesses of Google-style search engines as a whole: a high page ranking does not imply credibility. But of course we can make pages with high page rank -- forum posts, in this case -- become credible sources.
 
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This seems to be a relic of "no necroposting" culture that's been around since BBS days.
Your entire reply misses the point.
And your thread seems to miss ours.

In the end, active Paradox products can expect (roughly) one expansion pack and several patches and countless hotfixes per year. Even within the six month grace period we have for necromancy, games can drastically change and thus threads quickly are made obsolete. What generally happens when a user raises a thread up from its grave isn't that they get an answer, people from three years ago get yelled at by oblivious folks who didn't notice that they're responding to a post that was essentially about a completely different game.

Which is all moot, because the final decision to enforce the "no necromancy" rules goes through two filters: first, it needs to catch the attention of a moderator whether they stumble upon it or more likely get a report from another user (who must be convinced to report it to begin with) and then second, the moderator must decide whether to re-grave the thread which can carry some nuance with it. Personally, I've seen very few legit necromancies, and those that I do, I usually clean up the folks who missed the time stamp and then lock the thread, but when it's "Is there an answer?" I'm going to delete and send it back to the grave.

So that necromancy warning is really just a notification telling a user they might get their post deleted, no more effective at stopping the determined necromancer than one of those "Are you you 18+?" banners before porn that I'm sure has literally never stopped a horny 14-year-old in the history of forever.
 
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In the end, active Paradox products can expect (roughly) one expansion pack and several patches and countless hotfixes per year. Even within the six month grace period we have for necromancy, games can drastically change and thus threads quickly are made obsolete. What generally happens when a user raises a thread up from its grave isn't that they get an answer, people from three years ago get yelled at by oblivious folks who didn't notice that they're responding to a post that was essentially about a completely different game.
That's definitely not true with HoI 4. There have been no major pathces for almost 1 year.

And if you ever resume development on Imperator:Rome, it would be past 6 months for almost every thread.

second, the moderator must decide whether to re-grave the thread which can carry some nuance with it.
That's not what @RELee did with our thread Wrong and Missing Ships: How to correct them ALL.
When @redline @Znail @Licarious @Hoi Neuling and @goodcigar had a new discussion, they did exactly what we wanted them to do.

Please unlock our thread again.
 
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That's not what @RELee did with our thread Wrong and Missing Ships: How to correct them ALL.
When @redline @Znail @Licarious @Hoi Neuling and @goodcigar had a new discussion, they did exactly what we wanted them to do.
No. What happened was someone decided to "tell" another user, through the grave that their year-old point was addressed in your year-old thread. So it was necromancy and it was spamming self promotion. But go on.

But we're veering into Public Discussion of Moderator Actions, which is against ToS. So, thread closed.
 
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