there is also the reality that having new members who may find the community via a Google search and who arrive into a thread that is closed which they can't post into that becomes a huge deterrent to new folks signing up and joining the Community. There is a balance that needs to be found, and to be completely honest, without new members coming in and joining the fray what's going to be left in a few years?

 

I am on another forum for a different hobby. After so many days inactive threads get locked. If you want a thread to continue, you bump it. That is simply the way it is and has been since before I joined 5 years ago. Posters regularly refer to locked threads with links or screen shots. I never hear anyone complaining about not being able to post in a locked thread.

There are many new users that regularly join because of a thread they found from a search engine. They make a new thread and post links to the original one relevant to their new thread. Sometimes the new thread will be 50 pages long and essentially a "continuation" of the original. I have never seen anyone complain about not being able to bring a 10 year old thread back to life.

 

I believe the example Pete gave a while back didn't actually lock the thread, but rather gave a warning that since it's a dead thread, you might not get a response, and suggested actually starting a new thread instead. Nothing says it needs to be locked, but even if it did it wouldn't break my heart.

I also have never seen anyone complain about locked threads. It's kind of pointless, as what's going to happen when no one responds to a dead thread, they just need to start another anyways. Waste of time if you ask me.

 

Yes, to confirm, the idea of this project is just to provide a notice above the reply box explaining the thread's age/inactivity and encourage that a new thread may be better instead of replying to the given one the member's in. We won't be auto-locking.

 

Understandable. It will be a welcome improvement.

But I still stand strong on my vote to lock them

 

Yes Jason. It INFORMS someone. Makes them AWARE of something, gives them a CHOICE, allows them the freedom to ACT.
I can't see how that alienates anyone. Seems quite welcoming actually.

 

That's the way it's setup on our Bass Fishing Club and Mitsubishi site too. A notice at the top says "This Thread is inactive. You may not get a response/reply. Please feel free to start a new topic/thread if you require a response/reply." And it works. We get new traffic, from new members and if needed, we can link them to the old threads for reference. Too easy.

 

Yup. We never wanted anything else. Never wanted thread locking.

 

what we want is something that works for our users HERE....this isn't about locking anything, it's about getting people to the answer they're looking for as quickly as possible. I just want to see people with problems getting the answer they need asap....no bs

 

Jason, let me say thank you for your understanding of the situation. We've been chatting behind the scenes and agree you're on point with where this needs to go. It's pretty simple actually.

 

Happy to be of assistance! I'll keep you posted on the project's progress as soon as I hear anything further.

 

please do, that's been the missing link between IB and the admin/mods

 

On another note, what's with all the spam burpers lately? Hard to keep up!! Thankfully we have members keeping good track.

Damn auto-correct. Botters.

 

There's unfortunately been an uptick of spam in general. We've seen it rise recently across out network and beyond. Our tech team has a few new anti-spam measures they're cooking up to help minimize the impact, which I won't go into too much detail about publicly since I don't want to tip our hand haha. But it's been an ongoing game of whack-a-mole that we're hoping to squash as best we can ASAP.

 

we've been inundated with it, and it sucks bad, please deal with this asap please.