A Suggested Modification of Rule 7

[Taliesin]

Dude. The post that you made that got dinged for Rule 7 has no substance and communicates no information. Asking that you do not make low substance posts to threads that have laid dormant for a considerable amount of time shouldn't be an imposition, its basic netiquette. They happen to be codified in rules to prevent people from piling on asking you to stop.

If you like something and it has been dead long enough for the necro rules to set in, is it really that hard to just send the author PM? If I'm lurking a thread on the off chance an author comes back to it, I really don't need to see your 'attaboy' post polluting my inbox from a thread that hasn't seen an update in seven months.

I also don't see why anyone should have to update the forum software just because you are feeling inconsiderate of the other posters. If you had produced something substantive (an omake, an analysis, etc) that actually added to the discussion of the thread, I doubt you'd have been dinged.

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I wish to ask, why do you feel someone else using the forum to communicate is inconsiderate of you personally? I don't understand why you feel this way about other people's posts so strongly that you want them controlled just to avoid upsetting you. That's a pretty extreme reaction, the sort that would be reasonable for an issue like racial invective, not someone leaving someone else a thank you note.

It's the other way around. The vast majority of people fall into the category of either vaguely supportive of rules on thread necromancy or don't give a shit one way or another. It's a small amount of people who want a rule change and have a weird hangup regarding a pre-existing and widespread rule and rather than learning to live and let live they demand it be changed.

You've not really offered up a convincing reason for why a change should be made, nor for why it might be necessary to be made. When you then take into account that the forum already has methods for showing appreciation in the forms of likes, profile posts and PM's it just becomes clear that your reasons are already covered and so the change is completely unnecessary.

But in the end it's the site's staff's decision. If they want to make a rule change they will, if they don't then they won't.

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You've got the burden reversed. Cessante ratione legis, cessat et ipsa lex. Rules need justifications, otherwise they have no business being rules. Capricious dictates aren't good in any context.

So far the only justification offered is 'some people get upset when they see an alert if the OP isn't the one making the post', and that objection is easily remedied with a technical solution. A social solution that is burdensome to the moderators and censors posters is unnecessary if people getting upset about seeing a non-OP alert is the real issue. That is the argument, and it is a compelling one.

And yes, the people with power will do what they will do, but that's tautological and offers no insight on what should be done and why.

 

[schpariel]

I wish to ask, why do you feel someone else using the forum to communicate is inconsiderate of you personally?

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Because there are other, more polite ways to do so? And that by ignoring established convention and the existence of these other tools, you are saying that you feel that the basic rules of netiquette as practiced by the forum are beneath you?

The rules, policy, and convention have been around for longer than this site have existed, and have been established since its inception. Ignoring those conventions is thus viewed as impolite and annoying -- this is evidenced by the fact that you were hit with a rule that is only enforced when someone is annoyed enough to report a violation of it.

This means that by making your necro post, you spammed someone watching an inactive thread in case the author makes an update, e.g. a link to a sequel work. Liken it to walking into a quiet library and shouting "HEY I REALLY LIKE YOUR WORK" at somebody across the room rather than walking up to them and addressing them quietly. Everyone else in the room has reason to be annoyed.

Be polite. Don't necro. If you feel it is justified, send the author a PM or post on their wall, or just click the like button. Is that really so hard?

 

[Taliesin]

Because there are other, more polite ways to do so? And that by ignoring established convention and the existence of these other tools, you are saying that you feel that the basic rules of netiquette as practiced by the forum are beneath you?

The rules, policy, and convention have been around for longer than this site have existed, and have been established since its inception. Ignoring those conventions is thus viewed as impolite and annoying -- this is evidenced by the fact that you were hit with a rule that is only enforced when someone is annoyed enough to report a violation of it.

This means that by making your necro post, you spammed someone watching an inactive thread in case the author makes an update, e.g. a link to a sequel work. Liken it to walking into a quiet library and shouting "HEY I REALLY LIKE YOUR WORK" at somebody across the room rather than walking up to them and addressing them quietly. Everyone else in the room has reason to be annoyed.

Be polite. Don't necro. If you feel it is justified, send the author a PM or post on their wall, or just click the like button. Is that really so hard?

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It looks like there are a few different arguments to pick apart here. Let's address them one at a time.

Your first argument is 'leaving a thank you note in an old thread is rude, so you shouldn't do it'. You liken creating an easily ignored alert to shouting in a library. Your hyperbolic comparison aside, I don't believe it is reasonable for this to bother someone so much that they're justified in censoring others to the degree that we would accept for something like someone engaging in hate speech. A line of text just isn't worth raging about. The creation of the alert itself is a technical problem that is amenable to a simple technical solution. Using a social solution is unnecessary and inelegant.

That brings us to your second argument, 'this rule is traditional so you should respect it'. Tradition alone is not a reason for following rules. The circumstances that led to a rule being adopted can change. Continuing to follow a rule whose justification that no longer applies is not good policy. Cessante ratione legis, cessat et ipsa lex. In this case, old BBS systems did not have the sophistication to solve this problem on the technical level, so they adopted a messy social enforcement mechanism as an alternative. Modern forums can handle the issue on the technical level. There's no need for the heavy handed old social enforcement anymore.

I would suggest a better metaphor would be one diner in a restaurant demanding that everyone else in the restaurant be kicked out if they refuse to converse purely through passing notes to one another so the diner can enjoy their meal in silence. Forums, like restaurants, are places where people communicate with one another. It is what they are for. They are noisy. Someone demanding the nature of the place change to suit them to the point of censoring everyone else is acting in an unreasonable manner.

In the absence of a technical solution, have you considered not watching old threads if it really bothers you that much? If you think the author might continue a story you could always manually check back now and then, rather than demanding that everyone else comply with your desire not to have to ignore a line of text.

 

[Darrenb209]

I wish to ask, why do you feel someone else using the forum to communicate is inconsiderate of you personally? I don't understand why you feel this way about other people's posts so strongly that you want them controlled just to avoid upsetting you. That's a pretty extreme reaction, the sort that would be reasonable for an issue like racial invective, not someone leaving someone else a thank you note.



You've got the burden reversed. Cessante ratione legis, cessat et ipsa lex. Rules need justifications, otherwise they have no business being rules. Capricious dictates aren't good in any context.

So far the only justification offered is 'some people get upset when they see an alert if the OP isn't the one making the post', and that objection is easily remedied with a technical solution. A social solution that is burdensome to the moderators and censors posters is unnecessary if people getting upset about seeing a non-OP alert is the real issue. That is the argument, and it is a compelling one.

And yes, the people with power will do what they will do, but that's tautological and offers no insight on what should be done and why.

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Let me put it like this, since you aren't really listening. The current system has worked and worked well for the vast majority of users across a wide range of sites.

The change you want to implement is wanted by very few users and has little to no gain as the "gain" is already covered by other methods.

Both rules and change need justification. The justification for the current rule is that it works, it works well and that most people are genuinely not bothered by it.

The justification for change is that a small handful of people out of many, many more want the change despite there being no real gain from it.

At this point, the justification for maintaining the rule is significantly better than the justification for why it should be changed.

Also, your Latin phrase does not mean what you think it means. It's not about laws having to provide a justification but instead about the fact that if a law no longer has a purpose, the law should be removed. This was only ever meant to apply to laws, not rules and has nothing to do with justifications but instead purpose.

What this means is that your Latin phrase does not care one way or another about the quality of the justifications for why the law exists and instead merely asks if the law is serving a purpose.

 

[wasprider]

It looks like there are a few different arguments to pick apart here. Let's address them one at a time.

Your first argument is 'leaving a thank you note in an old thread is rude, so you shouldn't do it'. You liken creating an easily ignored alert to shouting in a library. Your hyperbolic comparison aside, I don't believe it is reasonable for this to bother someone so much that they're justified in censoring others to the degree that we would accept for something like someone engaging in hate speech. A line of text just isn't worth raging about. The creation of the alert itself is a technical problem that is amenable to a simple technical solution. Using a social solution is unnecessary and inelegant.

That brings us to your second argument, 'this rule is traditional so you should respect it'. Tradition alone is not a reason for following rules. The circumstances that led to a rule being adopted can change. Continuing to follow a rule whose justification that no longer applies is not good policy. Cessante ratione legis, cessat et ipsa lex. In this case, old BBS systems did not have the sophistication to solve this problem on the technical level, so they adopted a messy social enforcement mechanism as an alternative. Modern forums can handle the issue on the technical level. There's no need for the heavy handed old social enforcement anymore.

I would suggest a better metaphor would be one diner in a restaurant demanding that everyone else in the restaurant be kicked out if they refuse to converse purely through passing notes to one another so the diner can enjoy their meal in silence. Forums, like restaurants, are places where people communicate with one another. It is what they are for. They are noisy. Someone demanding the nature of the place change to suit them to the point of censoring everyone else is acting in an unreasonable manner.

In the absence of a technical solution, have you considered not watching old threads if it really bothers you that much? If you think the author might continue a story you could always manually check back now and then, rather than demanding that everyone else comply with your desire not to have to ignore a line of text.

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TL;DR: I like the no-necro rule, and I benefit from it every day. I am not interested in your solution.

First, the tools available for administrators are limited. Hate speech is clamped down much harder than a necro, which is just a banner and a warning. Hate speech gets thread bans, forum bans, temp bans, and continued misbehavior results in permanent bans. So your equivalency much more false than the initial example. Also, you seem to feel like a public thread is the equivalent of a private conversation, not that there may be lots of other people in ear shot.

Second, I enjoy the benefits of this tradition. The tradition is still valid and alive for a good social reasons. I am not particularly worried about DB size, and I'm a user.

Thirdly, consistently yelling across a big restaurant will get you kicked out for disrupting business and bothering other customers. The entire point of a thread is to make a conversation more narrow and less noisy. If there were no forums, no threads, and all posts were free standing your point would stand better. But that's not the case here.

Fourthly, I do go through and trim my watched threads. I tend to do it once every six months. And I keep watching some despite no posts for over six months.

Fifthly, one possible technical solution is to lock a thread with no activity for over 31 days. The OP can get it unlocked. We would miss a few omakes this way, but it would a technical solution that I would vastly prefer to your "solution".

 

[january1may]

For the record, here is the discussion from when rule 7 was originally introduced. Many of the same arguments were posted back then as well (well, minus the "it's been a rule since forever" one, since it didn't look plausible yet).

One major thing that came up there, and in some later rule 7 discussions, but, until now, not in this thread: as far as I'm aware, unlike SB and SV, QQ still does not have any "this is an old thread" notices in the post window (apparently due to unavoidable implementation problems), and at least in the default theme, the post timestamps are light grey on lighter grey in 8-point font.
So quite a few of the necro-posters might not even have been aware that they were necro-posting, because they didn't happen to squint at the tiny low-contrast timestamps (and might have expected a blatant notice, like on SB and SV).

 

[Taliesin]

Let me put it like this, since you aren't really listening. The current system has worked and worked well for the vast majority of users across a wide range of sites.

The change you want to implement is wanted by very few users and has little to no gain as the "gain" is already covered by other methods.

Both rules and change need justification. The justification for the current rule is that it works, it works well and that most people are genuinely not bothered by it.

The justification for change is that a small handful of people out of many, many more want the change despite there being no real gain from it.

At this point, the justification for maintaining the rule is significantly better than the justification for why it should be changed.

Also, your Latin phrase does not mean what you think it means. It's not about laws having to provide a justification but instead about the fact that if a law no longer has a purpose, the law should be removed. This was only ever meant to apply to laws, not rules and has nothing to do with justifications but instead purpose.

What this means is that your Latin phrase does not care one way or another about the quality of the justifications for why the law exists and instead merely asks if the law is serving a purpose.

Click to shrink...

I assure you I am listening to you. People can sometimes be so sure they're right that it's hard for them to accept, but it is quite possible for someone to dispute with an argument despite listening to and understanding it.

You argue that almost everyone wants the rule. Do you have any evidence for this? A poll, perhaps? Anything to indicate that people like having their ability to post in order threads curtailed? Or are you making the assumption that nearly everyone agrees with you because you believe so fervently in this that you can't imagine most people disagreeing? It looks like there was widespread objection to adopting the rule in the thread where it was originally discussed.

Censorship of others is an extreme solution to the 'problem' of the occasional alert for people who have chosen to sign up for alerts. You don't seem to be attributing proper weight to that when judging whether the current policy is justified. Extraordinary measures require extraordinary justification, and when a simple technical fix is a viable alternative the justification for a draconian censorship policy just doesn't have sufficient grounding.

I suspect you may have read things a little too quickly when you looked up cessante ratione legis, cessat et ipsa lex. You say that it isn't about laws having to provide a justification, but instead needing a purpose. I suggest you re-read that think about it a little more. The point of laws needing a purpose is that the purpose serves as justification, and laws need justification.

As for your objection that the doctrine is only about law and not rules, that draws a distinction without a difference. The difference between a law and a rule is scope; laws apply to whole societies, rules to more confined contexts, but otherwise they are the same thing. Both serve best when they are justified, as opposed to arbitrary. Both laws and rules with no more justification than 'because I'm in charge and I said so' or 'because that's how it's always worked', rather than 'because this is the best way to do things', are suboptimal.

TL;DR: I like the no-necro rule, and I benefit from it every day. I am not interested in your solution.

First, the tools available for administrators are limited. Hate speech is clamped down much harder than a necro, which is just a banner and a warning. Hate speech gets thread bans, forum bans, temp bans, and continued misbehavior results in permanent bans. So your equivalency much more false than the initial example. Also, you seem to feel like a public thread is the equivalent of a private conversation, not that there may be lots of other people in ear shot.

Second, I enjoy the benefits of this tradition. The tradition is still valid and alive for a good social reasons. I am not particularly worried about DB size, and I'm a user.

Thirdly, consistently yelling across a big restaurant will get you kicked out for disrupting business and bothering other customers. The entire point of a thread is to make a conversation more narrow and less noisy. If there were no forums, no threads, and all posts were free standing your point would stand better. But that's not the case here.

Fourthly, I do go through and trim my watched threads. I tend to do it once every six months. And I keep watching some despite no posts for over six months.

Fifthly, one possible technical solution is to lock a thread with no activity for over 31 days. The OP can get it unlocked. We would miss a few omakes this way, but it would a technical solution that I would vastly prefer to your "solution".

Click to shrink...

You've made several incomplete arguments here.

How do you benefit from the rule?

How does one form of censorship being less severe than another make it not censorship?

How is a thread not like a conversation, and how is speaking in it analogous to shouting, when reading what occurs there is strictly opt-in?

What are the benefits of the tradition? What 'good social reasons' does it exist for?

Why would you prefer even more censorship to a solution that fixed the unwanted alerts problem? Are unwanted alerts not the real issue?

 

[alethiophile]

Fundamentally, the answer is that the necro rule persists because we want it to. If we took a poll of the entire userbase and 90% of them wanted it changed, maybe we would change it. Or maybe not.

Meanwhile, you have 16 posts on the forum, and about 12 of them are in this thread arguing that the rules should be changed. No one is going to take you seriously given that; you might as well save your energy.

 

[LurkingInTheDeceit]

Just giving my two cents, but beyond the readers desires, I'd imagine not many authors want people reviving old threads of theirs for a myriad of reasons either. They might have lost their muse, hated the discussion it was generating or be busy with other projects. So they probably wouldn't be appreciative of any no effort posts that put it back into their field of view.

I don't personally mind necros, but that's just because I enjoy reporting them, so not really something in favour of getting rid of the rule.

 

[wasprider]

TL;DR: I like the no-necro rule, and I benefit from it every day. I am not interested in your solution.

First, the tools available for administrators are limited. Hate speech is clamped down much harder than a necro, which is just a banner and a warning. Hate speech gets thread bans, forum bans, temp bans, and continued misbehavior results in permanent bans. So your equivalency much more false than the initial example. Also, you seem to feel like a public thread is the equivalent of a private conversation, not that there may be lots of other people in ear shot.

Second, I enjoy the benefits of this tradition. The tradition is still valid and alive for a good social reasons. I am not particularly worried about DB size, and I'm a user.

Thirdly, consistently yelling across a big restaurant will get you kicked out for disrupting business and bothering other customers. The entire point of a thread is to make a conversation more narrow and less noisy. If there were no forums, no threads, and all posts were free standing your point would stand better. But that's not the case here.

Fourthly, I do go through and trim my watched threads. I tend to do it once every six months. And I keep watching some despite no posts for over six months.

Fifthly, one possible technical solution is to lock a thread with no activity for over 31 days. The OP can get it unlocked. We would miss a few omakes this way, but it would a technical solution that I would vastly prefer to your "solution".

Click to shrink...

Let's see if you've been paying attention:

You've made several incomplete arguments here.

How do you benefit from the rule?

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I benefit from the rule because I don't have "+1" and "me too" posts bumping up threads that haven't been updated in a while. I tend to use the Unread Threads function because sometimes I get multiple notifications for a thread, and I lose the first one. Especially ones that move fast after a significant update and have multiple OP responses within a day or so.

How does one form of censorship being less severe than another make it not censorship?

Click to shrink...

It's censure, not censorship. Your post is still there. And the annoyed people are still there too. Censorship would prevent people from speaking, or remove something from sight.

How is a thread not like a conversation, and how is speaking in it analogous to shouting, when reading what occurs there is strictly opt-in?

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A thread is not like a conversation because there are more than two participants. And there are more listeners than speakers. Everything you say is going out to multiple listeners. As someone who listens more than they speak, I'm interested in more signal and less noise. A "+1" or a "me too" post is noise.

What are the benefits of the tradition? What 'good social reasons' does it exist for?

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See above. When you necro, you are being inconsiderate of other people's time and attention. The other people being almost everyone other than the OP and necroing poster. And possibly even the OP.

Why would you prefer even more censorship to a solution that fixed the unwanted alerts problem? Are unwanted alerts not the real issue?

Click to shrink...

When people follow the no-necro rule, the alerts are not unwanted. I get a nice omake or something substantial. The "contributions" you want to see don't benefit me and are an active detriment to my enjoyment of this site (take time and attention for something I don't want to see). And would be the same on SB. (SV does not have the no-necro rule, so feel free to go wild there.)

As far as censorship goes, first understand the difference between censure and censorship.

Finally, understand the only reason I'm in this thread is to make sure there are multiple voices arguing against removing Rule 7. I don't want it to look like removing or modifying Rule 7 is unopposed.

 

[Darrenb209]

I assure you I am listening to you. People can sometimes be so sure they're right that it's hard for them to accept, but it is quite possible for someone to dispute with an argument despite listening to and understanding it.

You argue that almost everyone wants the rule. Do you have any evidence for this? A poll, perhaps? Anything to indicate that people like having their ability to post in order threads curtailed? Or are you making the assumption that nearly everyone agrees with you because you believe so fervently in this that you can't imagine most people disagreeing? It looks like there was widespread objection to adopting the rule in the thread where it was originally discussed.

Click to shrink...

I know that almost everyone wants the rule because, on a site with quite a few thousand members, even if most are spambots, there's less than 30 that want what you want. More than that, these threads show up once every year or two and are only populated by the usual suspects, I.E, the ones who were in previous threads or the really bored. This site has a significant shared userbase with multiple sites, we've all seen these threads many, many times before and all but the most bored of us have long since skipped out on interacting with the self-righteous who demand the site be changed to suit them.

So the evidence is overwhelming that either most people don't care and thus a change is unnecessary when considering the complete lack of reasonable gain from the change or that most people outright don't want the change.

Seriously, you're latching onto the idea that you are somehow being censored despite multiple avenues existing to accomplish what you want necromancy to be unbanned for? That's really not going to convince anyone.

And you think that the only difference between laws and rules is scope? Really?

Even if people were to somehow accept that, the scope is one of the reasons why laws need solid justifications and purpose.

A law without purpose and without justification is inflicting severe punishment for no real reason. A rule without purpose or justification would be inflicting incredibly minor punishment for no real reason.

A rule with a purpose and a justification however is throwing out an incredibly minor punishment for a reason.

If the rule has a purpose, in this case stopping necromancy and the justification that most users do not like necromancy as well as the issues that necromancy can and has previously caused then the incredibly minor punishment is being handed out for a good enough reason.

Sure, it wouldn't be good enough for a law, but we're dealing with rules here, not laws.

 

[Taliesin]

Fundamentally, the answer is that the necro rule persists because we want it to. If we took a poll of the entire userbase and 90% of them wanted it changed, maybe we would change it. Or maybe not.

Meanwhile, you have 16 posts on the forum, and about 12 of them are in this thread arguing that the rules should be changed. No one is going to take you seriously given that; you might as well save your energy.

Click to shrink...

If you don't care about adopting the best policies and merely do things because you feel like it, then you're right, there's no point in discussing it.

 

[Heaven Canceler]

I am gonna be honest, I am baffled that anyone would care about the rule that much to want to change it? I think I accidentally necroed like.. maybe 5 or so times across my entire internet history since I first made my account on SB in 2013? Like seriously, it isn't hard to avoid that and punishment is nonexistent unless you do it repeatedly....

If I want to poke someone or something, then I just write on their profile or make a PM... it isn't hard either and avoids alerting everyone this side of the moon. Also yeah, you can change the alert conditions so you only get an alert if the OP is writing something, but that is of limited usefulness if you want to follow a discussion. Not to mention some stories attract Omakes like crazy, many of whom will be interesting/fun to read.

 

[magic9mushroom]

I am gonna be honest, I am baffled that anyone would care about the rule that much to want to change it?

Click to shrink...

I do, actually. I've found several good old works thanks to necros.

I just haven't bothered complaining about it since it was introduced (at which time I complained vigorously), because there doesn't appear to be any point. See my previous post.

 

[Heaven Canceler]

I do, actually. I've found several good old works thanks to necros.

I just haven't bothered complaining about it since it was introduced (at which time I complained vigorously), because there doesn't appear to be any point. See my previous post.

Click to shrink...

The point has been mentioned a few times I believe, namely that people get pissed when they get wrong hope that this 5 year old story they really liked could get continued/rebooted etc..

You may not agree or like the point, but that is it. Changing that is pretty much impossible short of you inventing a mind control device.

Edit: My mistake, just checked your last post, you did mention that already. My bad.

As for randomly finding old works... I am not seeing the logic here? Permitting Necroing doesn't guarantee that any given work that gets necroed will be liked by you, or that it will feature a fandom you are even remotely interested in etc... it is thus not any more likely to get you something that you want than scrolling to a random page on the forum and hoping something hits your interest? (I have actually done this when I was particularly bored.)

If you just want to find old gems, a better method would be to check recommendation threads.... SB and SV both have major Indexes for Recommendations threads and stories:

The SB Mega Index

The SV Mega Index

 

[january1may]

it is thus not any more likely to get you something that you want than scrolling to a random page on the forum and hoping something hits your interest? (I have actually done this when I was particularly bored.)

Click to shrink...

I actually do that all the time, and feel really sad about my inability to actually communicate the fact of it hitting my interest to anyone else due to the necro rule.

I mean, even if the author was inactive, surely, if I could have mentioned my interest in the story thread, someone would have recommended me a similar story that I could also have enjoyed? Or even decided to write such a story themselves?
With the necro rule, I can't really think of any way of getting such recommendations short of spam-PMing every major commenter (which is probably worse than necroing in terms of infraction chance per expected recommendation).

(In extremely strong cases, where I actually felt that my life was now worse because a particular story I just found out about had not been continued [and there was no explicit discontinuation statement in the thread], I've been known to comment on the author's profile; so far this had yet to work.)
[EDIT: in contrast, I am aware of continuations spurred by necro posts in the main story thread; admittedly, none of the initial necros involved were by me.]

 

[Nekraa]

I actually do that all the time, and feel really sad about my inability to actually communicate the fact of it hitting my interest to anyone else due to the necro rule.

I mean, even if the author was inactive, surely, if I could have mentioned my interest in the story thread, someone would have recommended me a similar story that I could also have enjoyed? Or even decided to write such a story themselves?
With the necro rule, I can't really think of any way of getting such recommendations short of spam-PMing every major commenter (which is probably worse than necroing in terms of infraction chance per expected recommendation).

(In extremely strong cases, where I actually felt that my life was now worse because a particular story I just found out about had not been continued [and there was no explicit discontinuation statement in the thread], I've been known to comment on the author's profile; so far this had yet to work.)
[EDIT: in contrast, I am aware of continuations spurred by necro posts in the main story thread; admittedly, none of the initial necros involved were by me.]

Click to shrink...

Alternatively, post in the relevant X discussion thread and say, "hey, I read [story], anyone have recommendations for similar stories?".

 

[january1may]

Alternatively, post in the relevant X discussion thread and say, "hey, I read [story], anyone have recommendations for similar stories?".

Click to shrink...

I'm not aware of any sufficiently generic discussion threads on QQ, and even if such a thread existed, it would probably move far too quickly for my question to be noticed much anyway.

EDIT: besides, after a dozen or two of similar questions - I did say I do that all the time - I might end up infracted for spamming.

 

[HypoSoc]

I'm not aware of any sufficiently generic discussion threads on QQ, and even if such a thread existed, it would probably move far too quickly for my question to be noticed much anyway.

Click to shrink...

It's a forum You are free to make a thread. And we don't have such an expansive user base that threads would move too quickly.

Discussion threads are a better forum as they would have more traffic, and better room for discussion that can bounce between topics and introduce you to more stories.

If not going to threads, look for recommendation lists. Those are great ways to find good, old stories.

 

[january1may]

It's a forum You are free to make a thread. And we don't have such an expansive user base that threads would move too quickly.

Click to shrink...

OK, I'll try to make one. Hopefully it won't be locked down immediately, and it won't get lost under all the specific rec threads.

(...Actually, can someone unsubscribe from their own thread? Because if no, I'd rather not make the thread, or I'd be swamped with irrelevant alerts.)

 

[Nekraa]

(...Actually, can someone unsubscribe from their own thread? Because if no, I'd rather not make the thread, or I'd be swamped with irrelevant alerts.)

Click to shrink...

Just tested it, you can.

 

[Facepalmist]

Hmm, 12 days. That'll do...

The key point of anti-necromancy rules is encoded in the descriptor: necromancy.

When posting in an old thread, your primary aim should be to revive the thread by adding substantial, on-topic content to it - as in, to prove that the thread wasn't (or shouldn't be) actually dead in the first place. For an Index or a General thread, this might take the form of posting a snippet and/or story outline, some fanart, linking/embedding some new content or update news re. the relevant topic, providing a (de-/)recommendation for some fanfic, and so forth. For a CrW or Quest thread, this will mostly either take the form of a nice thick omake (ideally with the potential for further omake to fuel subsequent discussion re. the original fic and the omake's continuation), an in-depth review, maybe some fic-inspired fanart; the idea is much the same, except that its ultimate aim is to facilitate the fic's continuance by luring the original author/OP back to either continue the fic themself or adopt it out to someone else.

Doing this, is not necromancy - which is why it tends not to be punished as such. This is revival, or at least a good-faith attempt at it. It may not succeed, and in fact may end up with the thread being declared dead by mods (Thread-Lock) or by the OP, but it was worth the try and hopefully threadgoers at least came away feeling that their time wasn't wasted.

Your '+1'/'+meme' or 'plz update'/'iz this dead' or 'super-late [X] vote' is essentially the equivalent of poking a body with a stick. If the body was just dozing, you might get the desired response (then again, that response could include lashing out at the hapless stick-wielder or just waving them away as they roll over). If the thread's dead, then about the most you can realistically expect is a cloud of disturbed flies blowing up in your face and/or some chastisement from the responsible caretaker - with the other most likely response being the corpse getting up and lurching forward a few steps before falling over again because it's still dead.


In conclusion: revive bodies threads in the correct ways & circumstance and with the correct tools - and stop publicly molesting dead bodies threads with sticks. Yes, even if that is your kink.


(N.B.: of those other forums which share a substantail portion of users, SV is the main one with no rules against necromancy. It does, however, have rules against protesting instances of necromancy. As such, there's no cultural reason to think that allowing necromancy would cut the workload of moderators - they'd be there anyway.)