Etiquette question

[Enjoy your spaghetti]

Gentle Readers:

When one wishes to discuss a topic that has possibly been discussed before, what should be done? After doing a search, it is likely to find at least one thread devoted to said topic. However, many of those threads are old. Should a polite forum member add the new inspired thought to the older thread, or post the witty observation in a new thread while keeping in mind the way the previous thread went?

Fondest regards,
One New Thing Under the Sun

 

[brooklynbailiff]

Just necro the thread.

 

[Null]

People are going to complain either way. A better question to ask yourself is: "does this thread I just found answer my question?"
A really big misconception is that people think just because it can be said, or it hasn't been said, that it needs to be said.

However I'd suggest just necroing the old one if you really want to make a new post.

 

[champthom]

Ah, I'm glad you brought this up, I was going to bring up the matter myself in a thread.

My school of thought is that you should bump or "necro" the old thread. To be honest, my only serious forum experience has been with PVCC and we have threads that are still active even though they're like, 3, 4 years old. People rarely make new threads as they usually find an existing thread that meets their needs.

I've heard however that some forums discourage this and actually encourage people to make new threads but like I said, my experience has been with bumping old threads and I think doing so shows the resilience of the forum.

The only exception to this is if you plan to make a comment that's radically different than the context of the thread that it wouldn't be awful if you made a new thread, or if there's new information available that changes the entire tone of the thread.

My concern with starting new threads is that it mostly repeats what people have already said, and in turn I find that many people recycle their responses to these threads, that to me it's a case of people reinventing the wheel every few weeks or so.