I hate deleting posts unless there is a glaring reason as to why they should be deleted. The point of a forum like this is to discuss topics and share our opinions. Who am I say to say that a "me too" opinion is not valid enough to be included in the fray?
I know that I would be upset if one of my posts was suddenly deleted for what to me seemed like no good reason (in fact I have had this done to me in the past).
It's part of protecting free speech in my opinion. People have the right to say to say things that are annoying to others. People have the right to say vapid things as well.
Of course on a forum like this, there needs to be some framework in place so that it does not devolve into a free for all, but the question becomes where to draw the line. We need to be welcoming to our members and encourage them to contribute so it's not just the same cadre of individuals expousing their views all the time. If they get slapped on the wrist for a "me too" comment, they may decide not to say something much more meaningful in the future.
I have seen forum software that, when someone attempts to revive a thread that has been inactive for a certain amount of time, suggests that the poster create a new thread unless there is something really relevant in the old thread.
Interesting. Obviously we don't have that software here. What's your opinion about the usefullness of such software?
I don't know about other people here, but I find really long threads intimidating. In such cases, I don't know where the present discussion began, or what has been discussed so far, and I can't spend my whole day reading one thread to catch up. So I think it's best to let long old threads die. If some of the old hands want to politely post a link to a previous thread or a particularly relevant part of it, that is preferable to merging, in my book.
Excellent point!
On top of that, the search feature is practically useless to someone trying to find something without knowing exactly what to look for. I often have trouble finding threads that were active yesterday, because a lot of the other threads are nearing on containing every word in the English language, and something that was discussed a year ago in a very active thread, will match a search over something that was discussed 2 days ago in a less active thread.
Another excellent point!
On top of that, the "use the search" cry by itself is a bit unhelpful. For my first 4 months here, I thought that the grey Google box toward the top of the page was the forum search feature (it's far more prominent than the real search) and that produced completely useless results. I'm sure a lot of new people experience the same problem.
They come in threes!
I agree that the search is next to useless, so that isn't a very good solution to anyone.
As far as long older threads go, I agree that if you read them carefully, you start to notice that the same conversation starts to repeat itself a lot, and a lot of the same points tend to get made numerous times as the thread gets longer and people stop reading older posts on previous pages.
But I don't like locking threads much either, as that seems a lot to me like censorship. This is one of the reasons I'm appealing to all of you guys and gals!
(Disclaimer: this is not an "official Jref management team" thread. This is purely being done on my own initiative in order to find a better moderating style for myself. Although if we can come to a common solution to this old problem, that would be great!)
But topics of a personal nature or anything in the Practical subfora should probably not be revived or merged out of respect for the individual OP. And when you have days and weeks to spend exclusively searching only then should anyone attempt to wade through the impenetrable thicket of language topics....
