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Posting in old topics

JHunt
Community Hero

Posting in old topics

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.

6 REPLIES 6
TanyaYatskovska
SmartBear Alumni (Retired)

Hi JHunt,

 

Thanks for bringing up this question.

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

 

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Tanya Yatskovskaya
SmartBear Community and Education Manager



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.  


Marsha_R
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Radford
Super Contributor

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.

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
SmartBear Alumni (Retired)

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?

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Tanya Yatskovskaya
SmartBear Community and Education Manager



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
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