Because most people don't notice the thread's date at first.

Because others don't know they shouldn't post in old threads.

Because others just don't care and would rather continue the topic instead of making a new thread.

Sometimes it is still relevant though even after a year. This can be either a bug that is not resolved or a recurring issue.

Necromancy is banned, but when did that stop anyone?

As @Finedaible said, they should have the threads automatically lock after a certain amount of time without a comment added. That would free up the mods to handle just the cases where that is abused.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

Necromancy is banned, but when did that stop anyone?

As @Finedaible said, they should have the threads automatically lock after a certain amount of time without a comment added. That would free up the mods to handle just the cases where that is abused.

If they did that, the mods wouldn't have much discretion in allowing good threads to stay.

Auto-lock destroys guides, community resources, and creative content. They shouldn't be destroyed just because of the occasional need to lock an old thread imo.

Good thing that wouldn't be issue at all if all of those kinds of posts are being posted in the correct area of the forums and for those areas to not have the auto lock

Elsonso wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

Necromancy is banned, but when did that stop anyone?

As @Finedaible said, they should have the threads automatically lock after a certain amount of time without a comment added. That would free up the mods to handle just the cases where that is abused.

If they did that, the mods wouldn't have much discretion in allowing good threads to stay.

Auto-lock destroys guides, community resources, and creative content. They shouldn't be destroyed just because of the occasional need to lock an old thread imo.

Honestly, if a guide goes without a new comment for a long time, that might be an indication that it is abandoned.

I wonder if Vanilla has an addon for this already that would allow discussions to be locked after time, but allow moderators to block the auto lock on select threads. I mean, obviously, it could probably be created if it does not exist.

As far I'm aware that's not how it works. Most forums I've been in, auto-lock tends to be something that goes for the whole sub-forum or sometimes the entire forum.

And it's generally along the lines of 30 days after the last reply.

Auto-lock after a certain amount of time would be MAGNITUDES better than mod moving posts from this forum to those "where they go to die".

Vanilla is not a robust forum software platform. phpBB handles this sort of thing much more elegantly,

spartaxoxo wrote: »

TaSheen wrote: »

Auto-lock after a certain amount of time would be MAGNITUDES better than mod moving posts from this forum to those "where they go to die".

Auto-lock is separate to moving an active thread. This would still happen. The only difference would be that the mods would lose discretion on which threads to close. So rather than seeing a bumped thread closed with a message, we'd never see any old threads ever again.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Most of those "old threads" are pretty useless these days. I run forums of my own, and once a post has faded into obscurity (as in, no interest in over a year), it's auto-closed. In another few months it's pruned and gone.

If it's something that comes up again, it will be a new thread with new live input. That's how it should work.

What should NOT be happening is mods moving active involved threads to forums so those threads can die.

You can always (with the right software backend) have certain posts that are valuable retained. That's not a problem with a good forum backend.

Um....

"I love the vibrant, helpful atmosphere that having mods lock it creates."

How does that even make sense?

But what you posted was " I love the vibrant, helpful atmosphere that having mods lock it creates."

The mods here lock indescriminately, move ditto. What you're saying doesn't line up with that quote from your earlier post.

Mods locking and/or moving posts does NOT create a "vibrant helpful atmosphere" at all. Here, it creates an atmosphere of stifling anything that seems "outside a norm" - which norm we don't have a clue about.

Ah. I see the confusion as well and I get what you mean now. Thanks for explaining.

On forums like mine, auto-lock isn't an issue, because we are all very well acquainted with each other - and when the forum backend auto-locks after a given amount of time (varies depending on the forum for sure) most of the time, there's no question about "why" (because my forums now are very personal for friends and family who play a pretty severely limited subset of games - which encompasses TES and FO, as well as some other "marginally recognized" games which are not mainstream at all).

The problem here is that the mods are not very - um.... anything I say is going to get me in trouble probably....

I'm not sure why they're wholesale moving threads where they "think they belong". Mostly, where threads are moved is.... not actually of any value, because no one ever looks there for info. And the simple fact of moving threads to those forums is likely pushed by management for who even knows why.

The bottom line for me is that the only forum that needs to exist for most of us is General Discussion. There are niche cases for the PTS and RP (hmm, IS there an RP forum? I don't know - I write RP in this game, I don't post on a forum about it - and actually I haven't written anywhere NEAR the amount of fanfic I worte for Skyrim: four novels and counting, none of which I can actually publish of course).

So what annoys me is the nitnoidy micromanaging of moving threads. And - I believe that's all I'll say. For good and sufficient reasons....

The forum search results don't sort by date and so you look up whether something has been discussed, reply, and then realise the last post was in 1957.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Elsonso wrote: »

I wonder if Vanilla has an addon for this already that would allow discussions to be locked after time, but allow moderators to block the auto lock on select threads. I mean, obviously, it could probably be created if it does not exist.

As far I'm aware that's not how it works. Most forums I've been in, auto-lock tends to be something that goes for the whole sub-forum or sometimes the entire forum.

It is pretty much going to work however the addon is written to work, within the limits of the Vanilla API.

However, Vanilla does have a necro thread addon that they support. It does not lock the thread, but it does flag it as old after a set time, rather than locking it. I would be surprised if ZOS was unaware of it. It is probable that they decided not to use it. ZOS seems rather particular about how they want the forum to look, so they probably don't want to, or can't, use an off-the-shelf addon.

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I've also modded, and I absolutely despised auto-lock. So much creativity is lost. I love the vibrant, helpful atmosphere that having mods lock it creates.

The problem is that in a game forum like this, things can get stale pretty quickly. Do we really need old comments about an old version of the game being revived over and over, long after they are no longer an issue and the information isn't even relevant?

There is quite a bit of outdated information here on the forum, but there is low understanding about whether it is still relevant in the current version or environment. A reply to something old boosts the perception that it is relevant, when it may not be, as new viewers read the content for the first time. They may not even notice that the thread is years old. Unless they are practiced in checking dates, they probably won't. Locking would prevent this while flagging them will make it apparent that old or outdated information may be making another loop through the forum.

I would prefer that the moderators spend less time managing topics, and that includes the need to identify and lock old topics that contain information that is out of date and might be misleading.

Northwold wrote: »

The forum search results don't sort by date and so you look up whether something has been discussed, reply, and then realise the last post was in 1957.

I always limit my search to the date range I am interested in, but one solution would be to pre-fill the date limit to something recent, yet reasonable, and within the limits of the tolerance for necromancy here. Of course, that would hide older results from casual searches, so it is not an ideal solution.

Well then, I did not expect this subject to see this much interest, lol.

During a brief search I did come across this very old thread from 2016 where a mod commented on the subject of dead threads: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/2691405/#Comment_2691405

[...]
We're always happy to collect forum feedback. There does seem to be an uptick in necromancy recently. This may be lore appropriate, given the main plot of ESO, but zombie threads can be disruptive and confusing. It does appear that some of this is caused by new users searching for content and inadvertently posting in old threads.

We did investigate functionality to close older threads about a year ago. We had some issues with how the available tools operated, so we chose not to implement it. If this changes we may be able to reconsider.
[...]

So it would seem that there are no tools available to them to automatically close threads.