Posting in old topics

[JHunt]

It seems there are a lot of people asking "I have this problem too" on very old questions that never got answered.

How could we encourage people to create a new question instead? It's almost never appropriate to continue the discussion in an old topic, especially when the new question is only related, but not exactly the same question.

[TanyaYatskovska]

Hi JHunt,

Thanks for bringing up this question.

I noticed this before. What do you think we can improve here? 

[Marsha_R]

Don't allow posts on old topics after 1 month or so.  A new topic can always include a link to an old one for reference.  

[Radford]

Agree that closing/locking topics that have not been posted too for a length of time (1 month sounds fine) would be a good idea. Perhaps with the exception of allowing the original poster to post a follow up reply.

Personally I tend not to reply to these "I have this problem too" posts as there are usually multiple issues in the thread which just makes things confusing.

[JHunt]

Speaking of posting in old topics... 😉

I was wondering about the "sort posts chronologically" option when we move posts?

As an example, I have just moved a follow up question from this thread, originally asked in 2012, to its own thread.

I wondered if the "sort posts chronologically" option when moving would have moved the original thread back down to its original 2012 place in the list, which would be great. But I saw the warning about impacting performance, and there's some implication that it's going to sort the whole forum again, and I decided not to use it. But would it have been ok to do so in this case? What really are the side effects?

[TanyaYatskovska]

Hi JHunt,

Usually, if somebody posts a question to an old topic, the topic appears in the current list of topics. It's the expected behavior. I have never seen any warnings asking to re-sort all topics. I would ask you to avoid doing so.

Do you have any images of this warning?

[JHunt]

Not a warning asking you to do it, it's just an option on there on the "move post" page. You have the option to "Sort Posts Chronologically" and I thought that might the right thing to do. But in the tooltip when you hover over it says it could affect performance.

From your post I'll take it that I shouldn't use it.

Thanks
Jeremy