Some comments on this thread:
First, on the thread's subject, there's a disadvantage of responding to an old thread, namely that those who were taking part in it may have dropped it from the list of threads they're paying attention to. Reading TLF is an activity that different people approach in different ways, so we should
all bear in mind that there are other people here who read TLF in a significantly different way to the way we think of as the 'normal' way to read TLF. (And I actually suspect that there's enough variation that for everyone, there are
more people who read it in a significantly different way than they do themselves than that do so in basically the same way.)
For example, my basic method of reading TLF is:
* I'm subscribed to various boards (or 'forums' in phpBB-speak). I've set my notification options so that the only effect that subscription has is that I'm notified of new threads (or 'topics' in phpBB-speak - which is why I don't use the phpBB terms, especially when talking about moderation: the terminology just becomes too muddled in sentences like "This post isn't about its topic's topic, so it is off-topic" - and that's a mild example!).
* When I see a new thread, I read enough of it to decide whether I'm interested in it. If I am, I 'bookmark' it; if I'm uncertain, I probably do the same on a 'benefit of the doubt' basis. If I'm not, that's probably the last I see of the thread.
* My main reading list is simply the new posts in the threads I've 'bookmarked'. I regularly review the list of those threads with the aim of pruning it down: the main criterion I use is that if a thread has gone a week without being posted to, I drop it from the list
unless I have some particular reason to believe I'll want to refer to it again in the future. (Some might ask why I do this pruning - if an old inactive thread stays on the list, what harm is it doing? The answer is that I did for a long time just leave them on the list, but found there were so many of them that the few threads I did particularly want to refer to again became very difficult to find. I.e. the harm that they were doing was that they were massively cluttering up my view of the threads I did want to see.)
* I do deviate from that basic method in at least a couple of situations: if I've given a thread the benefit of the doubt and a bit more reading of it tells me I'm not interested, I may prune it early, and if something draws my attention to a thread on a board I'm not subscribed to, or to new material in a thread that I've previously dropped, and I decide I am interested in it, then I'll 'bookmark' the thread so that I start reading it.
I'm not putting that method forward as the perfect way of reading TLF (it isn't!) nor am I looking for suggested 'improvements' to it. I've seen a number of such suggestions over the ~18 months that TLF has been going, and I'm perfectly happy to accept that they are better for the person suggesting them, but they haven't been for me!
Instead, I'm putting it forward simply as the best method
for me that I've found. It's doubtless one that some of you will find is quite similar to your own method and others will find is quite different - which is exactly my point: there are lots of methods and none of them is an ideal 'one size fits all' solution. It does have disadvantages, and one of them is that if new material is posted to an old thread after it's been inactive for a week or more, I may well end up not seeing it. I can live with that disadvantage, and have decided to do so - but if someone is posting new material and wants as wide an audience as they can get for it, they may well find a new thread gets a better audience because I and others with similar TLF reading habits see it.
So I would consider the advantages of starting a new thread, especially when changing the subject significantly and when it becomes more major. As a somewhat extreme example, suppose that GlaxoSmithKline or AstraZeneca had released an RNS announcing that some drug that it has in development for a particular form of cancer had passed some particular stage of its clinical trials, a new thread had been started giving a quote from the RNS and a link to it, but no actual informed discussion of it, and that thread hadn't attracted any replies (which is the usual fate of such threads, I suspect because few Fools have the medical expertise to have any idea about the significance (or lack thereof) of such announcements and those few who do have better places to discuss it!). And then later the same company released an RNS announcing a takeover approach for or by the company... That's definitely a case for a new thread in my view: attaching it as a reply to the earlier thread carries a big risk of people not seeing it because they're not reading that thread (certainly I am unlikely to ever 'bookmark' such a thread in the first place, as I lack the medical expertise to comment on such developments myself, or even to get anything meaningful out of responses by others who do have that expertise, should they happen).
On the other hand, if the same company were to release another RNS announcing some other clinical-trial progress of the same drug (maybe to a further stage, or in a different jurisdiction), that would be a definite case for adding it to the old thread in my view: organising such stuff into a single thread might actually end up giving people at least a general impression of the overall structure of the clinical-trial process. (Not that I think that is something the moderators could sensibly enforce, given their limited availability of time and effort. It requires a user who is willing to put in a sufficient amount of
their own time and effort to achieve such results...)
So I think that the more major factors in determining whether to reply in a new thread or the old one are:
* How well what the new material is about aligns with what the old thread was about: the better-aligned, the less smaller the case for using a new thread.
* How major the new material is: the less major, the smaller the case for using a new thread.
* How important you regard it as being to bring the new material to the attention of those who may have dropped the old thread from their reading list: the less important, the smaller the case for using a new thread.
How long the old thread has been inactive seems a comparatively minor consideration to me, but not a non-existent one, because it will have an effect on how many have dropped the old thread from their reading lists.
None of that produces definite rules, and I rather doubt that sensible definite rules about such "use old thread or new?" questions are possible: there are too many grey areas. Basically, posters have to make judgement calls for themselves - I'm just suggesting some factors to consider when making such judgement calls. And I don't really expect the moderators to intervene unless a poster has made what they consider a
clearly wrong judgement call. E.g. in the above example of posting about a takeover RNS in an old thread about an obscure progress-in-clinical-trials RNS, I would expect them to intervene by splitting the new takeover-related material out into a new thread; anything much less than that would probably be left as the poster had called it. (And as to the reason why I have that expectation, it's again simply the practical one of availability of moderator time and effort - i.e. I'm not saying that situation is ideal, just that it's what we've got and is going to be hard to improve in practice.)
There are of course additional methods besides just posting to the old thread or starting a new one, such as the ones already mentioned of posting a new thread that just crossposts into the existing thread to draw a significant development in it to people's attention, or posting a new thread and crossposting into it from the old thread, or using a changed subject in the old thread (that last one is unlikely to make any difference to me, as experience says that I'm unlikely to even notice a new subject in a thread I'm reading unless something explicitly draws it to my attention, and of course I won't even get the chance to notice a new subject in a thread I'm not reading). Another I would mention is that if you post a reply to a specific post in an old thread that hasn't been active for a while, and particularly want the author of that post to notice your reply, an "in case you're no longer reading the thread, I'd like to alert you to the fact that I've replied to your post" PM to the author might be appropriate.
Incidentally, I have of course given some strong hints in the above to anyone who wants to post to TLF with a minimal chance of me responding! That's again something I can live with... ;
-)
And to finish with:
GoSeigen wrote:Heh, since the abuse was mainly of me, it's ironic that I feel the thread should have been allowed to continue!! Personally, I think the abusers should be dealt with, rather than gagging the individual being abused or closing down the conversation. Conflict is acceptable. Abuse is not.
Sort-of-agreed in principle, but in practice there isn't a clear abuse vs conflict dividing line: different people have different ideas of when it is crossed (and IMHO, I've seen a fair number of cases where the same person even appears to have different ideas about it depending on whether they are possibly being abused or possibly abusing others...).
Also, there aren't just the person who is possibly being abused and the person who is possibly doing the abusing to consider: there are all the other readers of the board, who may find themselves being put off reading the thread by the exchanges even if both the 'abuser' and the 'abused' are perfectly happy to let them stand. In particular, I've certainly seen threads become what I regarded as pretty unpleasant (and completely off-topic) reading despite neither being the target of the comments that made it so nor contributing any of them.
The net result is that those who are more tolerant of what might be termed 'robust' exchanges than TLF's moderation standards permit have to put up with threads being moderated when they would be happy for the thread to be left alone - and equally, those who are less tolerant of such exchanges than TLF's moderation standards require have to put up with them being left alone when they would be happier to see them moderated. And as few will find themselves in precise agreement with TLF's moderation standards, most of us have to put up with something! (Or of course decide that they won't put up with it - and then their only real alternative is to give up on TLF and leave.)
None of that is stuff the moderators can alter. What they can do something about is making TLF's moderation standards as consistent as possible (though with practical limits due to moderation decisions being judgement calls, and to available time/effort limiting the degree to which they can make consensus decisions rather than individual-moderator ones), and making TLF's moderation standards stricter or less strict (though with practical limits due to potentially driving too many users away if they go too far in either direction, and to what the site owners will tolerate).
The net result is that I'm afraid I give very little weight to "but I'd have preferred the thread to continue" comments from the targets of abusive comments. I do regard the moderator technique of dealing with such comments by locking the thread as a decidedly less-than-ideal solution - slightly less so than the TMF equivalent, which was for the moderator to post a "thread-stopper" and then remove any further replies. But both of them IMHO suffer from the major problems of 'punishing' all thread participants, not just those who made the too-'robust' comments
and (unless supplemented with further measures) of leaving the existing too-'robust' comments around to be read, thereby giving those who read them a false impression as to what is acceptable on TLF threads. (Yes, there will often be a moderator comment along the lines of "Thread locked because of too much personal abuse" - but readers are basically left to judge what comments were deemed personally abusive by their own standards, so that's especially unhelpful to those readers whose standards differ markedly from TLF's, who are of course the ones who most need to be helped about the issue!)
Having said that it's decidedly less-than-ideal, though, if any significant amount of too-'robust' comments has accumulated, any solution other than just locking the thread will clearly require significantly more moderator time and effort. So while decidedly less-than-ideal, it may well be the only practical option...
Gengulphus
