Forum Discussion

JHunt's avatar
JHunt
Community Hero
6 years ago

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

  • TanyaYatskovska's avatar
    TanyaYatskovska
    SmartBear Alumni (Retired)

    Hi JHunt,

     

    Thanks for bringing up this question.

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

     

    • Marsha_R's avatar
      Marsha_R
      Champion Level 3

      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.  

    • JHunt's avatar
      JHunt
      Community Hero

      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's avatar
        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?

  • Radford's avatar
    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.