Thread: Why is "thread bumping" so bad??

  1. #1
    napKINfolk.com napkin111's Avatar
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    Why is "thread bumping" so bad??

    Every time someone posts a reply on an old thread, it gets closed. Every time I have seen this, the new reply is relating to the topic and perfectly relevant. Now I'm wondering, is there any real reason (um...slows down server/bandwidth...) to close these threads, or is it just that the admins are bored and are having a power trip? Just wondering, not a personal attack on anyone or anything.

    //napKIN
    "The best way to get answers is to just keep working the problem, recognizing when you are stalled, and directing the search pattern.....Don’t just wait for The Right Thing to strike you – try everything you think might even be in the right direction, so you can collect clues about the nature of the problem."
    -John Carmack

  2. #2
    Rambling Man
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    From my understanding that an old thread being bumped is considered to being brough up from the "dead", and thus is forcing new threads to be pushed down. If all old threads keep on getting bumped, then there won't be much room for new threads. Having a forum full of old threads is not all that interesting, IMO. Basically, it's a way to make sure that the forum continues on with new topics and lets old topics die out.

  3. #3
    Blank
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    It looks like they went a little overboard on your
    case since there's about a million ways to solve that problem.

  4. #4
    Blank
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    Got the names mixed up. I was referring to the
    Nakeerb. Just about any parsing technique that evaluates an
    expression can be made to generate an infix tree.

  5. #5
    Rambling Man
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    Nick, what are you talking about???

  6. #6
    Mayor of Awesometown Govtcheez's Avatar
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    Because frequently the old threads that are dredged up are old flame wars that someone wants to keep going just to keep flaming. They get in the way, it confuses things, and it's just generally annoying.

    I still don't understand this power trip people talk about. "Oooo - I can edit text and close documents and stuff! It's like the worlds most bestest text editor!" It's not like we get any perks for being mods, really - there are a couple extra boards, and we get to deal with morons. Woo. Hoo.

  7. #7
    Refugee face_master's Avatar
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    *bump*

    Sorry to always be a smart-ass...

    No prob :P
    -Govtcheez

  8. #8
    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    Look at it this way nap, if a thread was interesting enough, relative enough, or just generally cool, it wouldn't need to be bumped, hence all the bumped threads, don't need to be bumped at all.

  9. #9
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    You can only thread bump if the thread problem isn't solved yet
    and if it wasn't a flame topic or high bandwith show your desktop
    RoD topic's .

  10. #10
    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    When my threads become a problem i remove them :P

  11. #11
    Registered User
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    Originally posted by RoD
    When my threads become a problem i remove them :P
    Really? How did you bind the Delete Topic to a key then?

  12. #12
    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    i'll ignore that....

  13. #13
    Mayor of Awesometown Govtcheez's Avatar
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    Laugh - haha - it's a joke.

  14. #14
    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    :P

    why aran of what ever do you speak?

    :P
    Last edited by RoD; 01-20-2003 at 09:28 AM.

  15. #15
    Administrator webmaster's Avatar
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    Basically, what TechWins, Govtzcheez, and RoD have said sums it up. To give my own reasoning for the rules:

    If a thread hasn't been replied to in a while, there's a reason it hasn't been replied to in a while; people had nothing else to say about it or got fed up with it. If you have something interesting enough to say that you think the topic should be revived, you can start a new thread. Doing so avoids the irritation felt by anyone who starts reading through a supposedly new thread and then realizes that it was written two months ago. It also gives your thread more credibility if you mention that the topic has already been discussed but that you would like to continue the discussion. Of course, a lot of people probably remember -- and are still uninterested in continuing -- the dead discussion.

    Now, you might reply that you have a direct response to something written in the thread: Think of it as entering a room, listening to a conversation, then jumping in near the end of the evening with a comment related to the first ten minutes of the discussion; nobody else would want to talk about it.

    On a final note, it's generally frowned on to bump a thread that hasn't been answered. In principle, if someone knows the answer, that person would have responded to the thread (especially considering that threads remain on the first page of the message board for a sufficient length of time that most people who wold read it will have read it).

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