Originally posted by dEAdOnE77:

So called Necro-Thread

Why do the mods close these thread and say:
This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.

This is so infuriating, if this realy was a problem threads should close by semself after a year, becauze the people just use the buildin search function for a topic, find a thread fitting for their thoughts and start posting.

It has nothing todo with necroing or confusion, and it is all about searching for a topic and finding one.

So closing these thread only adds confusion.

Things may change and old threads may have outdated information.

Just make a new one. You can even cite the old thread in it for more context.

Could be the attitude has changed and the mods are being diplomatic.

will like threads to be closed after certain amount of time automatically. But by the end of the day, that is wishful thinking. Create a new thread. There is possible few reasons why they leave it open and only close it when someone necro the thread

Working theory is that the mods are a part of a "call center," and they have a quota of "tickets resolved." Which explains why they don't close many "old" threads for most of the month, then close a ton of them all near the same time.

In other words, padding their quota numbers.

Originally posted by D. Flame:

Working theory is that the mods are a part of a "call center," and they have a quota of "tickets resolved." Which explains why they don't close many "old" threads for most of the month, then close a ton of them all near the same time.

In other words, padding their quota numbers.

Understandably, that's wildly speculative. It's more that they work off of reports only. They are not actively reading or researching topics for certain criteria. Given the nature of user reports, any quota would be timed based, not quantity based.

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

Originally posted by D. Flame:

Working theory is that the mods are a part of a "call center," and they have a quota of "tickets resolved." Which explains why they don't close many "old" threads for most of the month, then close a ton of them all near the same time.

In other words, padding their quota numbers.

Understandably, that's wildly speculative. It's more that they work off of reports only. They are not actively reading or researching topics for certain criteria. Given the nature of user reports, any quota would be timed based, not quantity based.

Nah, bro. They took over 3 hours to delete a thread making unalive threats right in its title, and that thread was being mass reported, but these necro threads are being closed in 2 hours or less, even when they are in super-slow, mostly-abandoned boards.

On a board that gets maybe 1 post per month, no one is reporting a thread that got a bump after 3 weeks, but somehow the Steam mods magically find it and shut it down in less than 2 hours.

Originally posted by dEAdOnE77:

Why do the mods close these thread and say:
This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.

This is so infuriating, if this realy was a problem threads should close by semself after a year, becauze the people just use the buildin search function for a topic, find a thread fitting for their thoughts and start posting.

It has nothing todo with necroing or confusion, and it is all about searching for a topic and finding one.

So closing these threads only adds confusion.

The answer is very simple: they close threads because people report it. If nobody ever report anything the chance they stumble on a thread and close it by themselves is almost non existant. I often do it myself and I have to say that it is so much a remote chance that people resurrect threads for a good reason that I only ignore it for something akin to 10% of the time. It is so annoying to have a random dude barging into a several years old thread in a random game and start instigating one or more posters in the old threads for things which you know are not even things in the game anymore because there has been an untold amount of patches since then... Ugh. Why even try to start BS with other users for stuff that is not even relevant anymore?

The main thing here however is that when you report people like that very often support is also going to delete those new messages before they close the thread. For an outside observer it might look like they closed it for little to no reason but in reality it is not your place to start whining about moderation. There is a lot of moderation done every day that you simply will not be made aware unless you basically roam a specific board and read everything in almost real time.

In the end, old threads are supposed to exist as reference tools. Starting a new thread while giving a link to an old one as reference is always the better solution.

Originally posted by dEAdOnE77:

threads should close by semself after a year

Agreed. In fact, I would suggest threads automatically lock when they sink below a certain threshold. Keep them for posterity and reference, but lock them to prevent necro posting.

Valve really doesn't seem interested in making a lot of changes to their formula though. This is both my favorite and most frustrating part about them.

Pretty much every "official" forums I've read in the last couple decades has had a "lock all necros" rule. It's normal to me, I'm always surprised at people surprised by it.

Originally posted by dEAdOnE77:

Why do the mods close these thread and say:
This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.

It's just the generic "locked a necro" reply; but yeah, the 'confusion' thing makes more sense on threads in MMO/live-service/etc games where there are constant patches changing things. And a thread from 1+ years ago can easily be referring to game mechanics/etc that no longer exist. And *will* cause confusion among new readers.

Originally posted by wesnef:

Pretty much every "official" forums I've read in the last couple decades has had a "lock all necros" rule. It's normal to me, I'm always surprised at people surprised by it.

Every modern forum has an auto-lock feature, so if they want to avoid necros in a certain sub forum, they can set it to auto-lock after 90 days without a post. Then any thread not already locked is fair game.

Steam just refuses to add this basic feature, among others.

Plus, the generally accepted time frame for a necro is 90 days or more, but as of late, mods have been locking threads that are as little as 3 weeks old. So a post opened at the end of April might get locked two and a half weeks into May. This is why there is renewed criticism of the practice.