Hi friends! So I know that thread bumping can be annoying – Glitch, like all software online, moves fast and often year-old threads are about features that we’ve since changed or don’t exist anymore – So while it’s okay to encourage users to create new threads so they can get the answer to their specific question, I ask that you do it in a friendly and helpful manner. I kindly ask that you avoid replying to thread bumps with something only like "don’t bump old threads."
New users who come here don’t know they shouldn’t do it, and I don’t want their first impression on here to be getting told they did a bad thing. It reflects poorly on the forum and all of us that are active on it! One way to respond would be “[Answer to their question]. In the future, questions like this deserve their own new, fresh thread, since we try to avoid bumping year-old threads in this forum.” This teaches folks the behaviors we want to see and may be new to them, versus just making them feel bad and unwelcome. And also it may give them the answer to their question, which is what they came here for!
I’m going to work with Tasha to see how we can automate the prevention of old threads being bumped (I welcome ideas or how you’ve done this in your own Discourse forums in this thread!), but in the meantime I really appreciate your patience with us and your fellow forum posters!
What about a thinner, one-line entry with smaller text size for old inactive threads, that expands to full size if the thread has a certain amount of activity?
Hi @jenn!
I agree, lots of times it’s not really been appropriate to just tell a user that the thread shouldn’t be bumped and considering it’s not in the Community Guidelines, how were they supposed to know? I much prefer your nicer method of explanation. You already have automatic closing on old threads and I think that is enough. There’s no need for people not to reply if it hasn’t elapsed the set time before closing.
Regarding @hello-smile6’s suggestion:
This forum is a hosted instance of Discourse, a forum software, and you’ll need to suggest it to them as that is too big of a change that can be done by Glitch. Discourse have a Meta forum for discussions like that.
@EddiesTech Could they add a custom stylesheet and script (even if it just makes xmlHTTPRequests to check for old threads and change the design of the entries accordingly using the class attribute? They must have some server-side control.
Yes, but putting that much effort in to actually change or add custom code is not really justifiable for Glitch – this forum isn’t their product. The better idea is to make it a request to Discourse and then it may be added for the forum, or you could make your own Discourse plugin and Glitch could add it to the forum
