Reviving old threads?

[Buck]

Can someone explain to me why answering with a solution (or adding a useful info) in an old thread is considered universally bad?

I usually look for answers on search engines, naturally forum threads on various sites turn up. So I'm essentially treating the threads as QA pages, if a relevant question was asked, say, in 2018 and then someone stumbled upon a good solution in 2021 and posted it in that very thread, an external visitor would immediately get a good answer along with all the other supportive answers. However the practice is generally frowned upon.

So, essentially then forums are treated like giant chat rooms where people are expected to ask same questions over and over again which sometimes leads to people telling the posters to search the forum. So why not treat forums more like wiki sites where there is a single thread/page dedicated to a particular issue? Conversely, if we are treating forums like chat, then why not have a chat website instead, like a Discord chat for example?

 

[zirias@]

Can someone explain to me why answering with a solution (or adding a useful info) in an old thread is considered universally bad?

Sure: Most of the time, if the thread is years old, the issue discussed will be at best somewhat similar, but not the same any more. And worse, previous comments suggesting things might be horribly out of date, but brought to general attention again.

This doesn't mean posting to such an old thread is always bad, it just very often is…

 

[drhowarddrfine]

I understand your point Buck However, sometimes people will ignore a thread if it is old and won't read any responses to it for that reason. I would start a new thread but link to the older one as reference.

btw, there is a FreeBSD discord channel.

 

[free-and-bsd]

BTW,

I usually look for answers on search engines, naturally forum threads on various sites turn up. So I'm essentially treating the threads as QA pages, if a relevant question was asked, say, in 2018 and then someone stumbled upon a good solution in 2021 and posted it in that very thread, an external visitor would immediately get a good answer along with all the other supportive answers.

I'm with you on this one -- if the question IS really interesting and not yet properly answered, or YOUR answer is really good. I do it myself at times.
Though not very often, but it still happens that certain issues are so uncommon that a satisfying answer has not been given, even the OP has given up... like: "Oh, I resolved this issue by wiping my HDD out and doing new installation/ bought a new computer... etc" But how about the real answer to your original question?? Not interested any more...
...but then YOU yourself come to face the same issue and you do find a solution. Why not post it?

 

[SirDice]

If you have something meaningful to add to an old thread then it's fine. But a lot of times people necropost by adding useless commentary, that's what's being frowned upon.