The discussion revolves around whether to disallow first-time posters (trust level 0) from bumping old topics. rahul286 argues that new users often rush to post, search old threads, and bump them with off-topic questions, which can be disruptive. codinghorror counters that in practice, new users typically don’t search at all and instead create new topics, making the issue less about bumping and more about lack of research. rahul286 acknowledges that some users do search but may jump to topics based on titles alone, leading to off-topic replies, and notes that seeing active discussions might encourage such behavior. The conversation highlights differing perspectives on user behavior and the potential for old topic bumps to cause confusion.
This is related to the setting warn_reviving_old_topic_age
Problem is, first time poster are often in too rush to post their problem, they just search old threads and bump up old ones.
Idea is to disallow first time poster or users with trust-level-0 to bump-up old topics.
Setting warn_reviving_old_topic_age could be moved to trust-level settings groups. Each trust level will have independent value for warn_reviving_old_topic_age .
That’s kind of the opposite of what we see in practice.
New users usually don’t search at all and post a new topic even though one suitable for their purposes already exists. The lazy path is to not search and just create yet another duplicate topic.
So while I can see this setting would be useful in some narrow circumstances I am not really convinced it’s a good idea in general as it blocks and suppresses some behaviors you actually want new users to engage in – search before creating a new topic.
We typically block new topic creation on sites, e.g. require TL1 to create a new topic, that’s already possible.
I have seen cases where people did search but jumped to a topic which looked close by title. They did not read entire topic and problem being discussed and simply posted off-topic questions.
May be seeing more number of people involved in old discussions encourages them to post there as such offtopic replies go to other site members participated in old thread. I can say this because many times before moderator team, a regular user in that thread replies requesting new user to start new topic.
Though I’m happy with split and merge options. I personally would prefer a confused new user to create new topic over bumping wrong thread. Reason - old threads may annoy people subscribed to that old thread only. While staff will always get a notification.