On Thu, 14 Jan 2016, Kaz Kylheku wrote:

On 2016-01-14, wrote:
You realize this is five years old and some of these people could be
dead.

It might be nice to resurrect threads on websites that simply copy
Usenet but have no content of their own, but to respond to it on
Usenet is not nice. Some people get ****ed off.

Threads about a fixing particular piece of consumer electronic equipment
tend to be old.

If someone has *new* information to add, like "I fixed a similar problem
with the same unit, and it went like this" it's perfectly fine;
there is nothing wrong with referencing the old thread.

No it's not fine.

This is not google, where the messages all appear. usenet was never
intended to be archived.

SOme idiot replying to an old thread isn't being part of the newsgroup,
they are simply doing google.

ANd whether or not that's good, the blunders pile on. They don't quote,
they don't acknowledge they are replying to an old message, they may not
even have a proper subject header (so instead of "" so we know it's a
reply, it can often look like the start of a thread. Without quoting,
there's no context, the only reason the post makes sense is because other
idiots before them have done the same thing, so it's most likely a google
idiot post.

The reality is people are replying to old threads for reasons that aren't
clear, but I suspect some of it is that they simply don't grasp where they
are, or that they are replying to an old thread.

And too often, someone replies to an old thread, and others jump in as if
the thread is new, because they are reading at google and the thread then
"comes to the top" and starts replying to the old thread. Too often,
those people haven't even read the old thread, so they are not adding
anything to it. Or, the person replying to the old thread gets replies,
again as if the thread is new. Often the old thread has covered the
problem, and anything new is just repetition. We had a resurrected thread
last year here, and it wasn't so old, so some of the original participants
replied, a second time, and gave about the same answer as they did the
first (and in that thread, the original poster had posted a followup, back
then, to reveal what solution had worked for them).


That's on top of the stupid posts where people ask a 1991 post "is this
thing still for sale?" or the like. Don't try to justify this based on a
specific newsgroup, the problem is that google still hasn't fixed the bug
that allows replies to messages older than 30 days.

You want everything neat and tidy in one place, but that doesn't happen.
And the same search that found the original thread should indeed find any
separate followup thread that someone posted much later.

Our place here isn't to deal with the future, at google, our place here is
an ongoing discussion of the repair of electronic equipment (or whatever
the newsgroup is intended for, if this was another newsgroup).

Look, you're just not going to find a current, continuous, day-to-day
discussion thread on a darned Sherwood RX-5502, right?

You're assuming that people only ask about current equipment.

I've read this newsgroup since late 1994, and when I got full internet
access in 1996, dejanews had already started archiving usenet posts. That
was neat, because every time I dragged home some neat piece of equipment
from a garage or rummage sale, I'd do a search, and often find some bit of
information about the new junk. If I'd needed to ask something, I'd not
reply to an old thread (and that option wasn't there with dejanews).

But if I'd wanted to ask about something I just dragged home, I'd post
away. And maybe someone would have information, maybe not, it depends on
who is reading the newsgroup.

Any of the idiots who keep replying to old threads is welcome to be a
member of this newsgroup, all they have to do is post a message, if they
want to talk about something old, that's okay too. Just don't reply to an
old message.


But if you start trying to help that person from seven years ago by
asking questions, like "does the front panel light up, or is it
completely dead?" then you're indeed a necroposting moron who annoys
people, and probably shouldn't be using any device that has a CPU
and network connection.

But when some idiot replies to an old post, here it's not so obvious
(except because there are telltales that we notice after the repeated
abuse), so others chime in to the old thread as if it is new. So whether
or not the first replier has some good thing to add, it's distruptive to
the newsgroup.

Forget about google, act here like this is Usenet, which it is. Messages
fade with time, unless someone saves them to their own hard drive. It's
nto intended to be a long term medium. So don't treat it like it is.

Anyone can post and say "there was a discussion ten years ago, and I
thought I'd add some more insight", they can even reference the old
message, or "I just got this new thing, so I thought I'd post some
comments about it". They don't need to rely on someone previously posting
about it.

Michael