Suggest warning for posting on old threads

There have been any number of old threads that someone finds and adds what is essentially a useless comment to. Very often these people commenting on old threads are new forum members that have very low post counts.

I know that sometimes commenting on an old thread is appropriate, but often it is not. To that end, I propose a couple of modifications to forum posting I'd like to see.

The first is that new members with low post counts can't post on a thread where the most recent comment is over 6 months or a year old.

The second modification I'd like to see is when someone posts on a thread where the most recent comment is over 6 months old that they get a warning that the last comment was over n months ago (or n years ago for older threads) and are they sure they want to do that. The exact wording for this message would need to be worked out.

Between the 2 of these I would hope that we don't see old threads resurrected that should not be resurrected.

Darth.Titan said:

Unfortunately most of the time when an old thread is resurrected, it's by a spammer with 2-3 links in their signature they want you to click. These posters would not be deterred by your suggestions. Other posters usually pile in after the spam post not realizing how old the thread is.

Your recommendations, while reasonable, would do very little to reduce the occurrence of thread resurrection. That is just my opinion though.

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My first suggestion would catch spammers with few posts. And my first suggestion would also catch new forum members who are looking for any post to comment on.

Scepticalscribe said:

Well, yes, but what is the problem with resurrecting old threads? If ignored, they'll die a natural death of their own accord.

Besides, I have another concern about seeking to censure someone for resurrecting an old thread, wittingly or unwittingly. Indeed, how often are newbies (genuine newbies, stumbling around seeking some sort of information, not, obviously, the spam merchants) told to search old threads to find an answer to a question, or an issue which has been dealt with ages ago.

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I don't have a problem with resurrecting old threads when it's appropriate to do so. But there are always threads resurrected for the wrong reason.

That's why I suggested a warning that would still allow them to post if they want to. Many people never realize the date when the post on an old thread.

Maybe the gate for new forum members to post on an old thread should be somewhere between 1 and 5 days to cut down on the spammer issue.

SandboxGeneral said:

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Adding extra duties for us to issue reminders/warnings for such is not a good idea either.

We do appreciate the suggestions though.

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I did not mean a manual warning, I meant an automated message when the comment is being posted of something like "This thread is x months/years old are you sure you want to post to it?" The person can then hit yes or no. No manual intervention required by a forum moderator/admin. It would just be adding code to the forum system to do that.