Hello is there anybody home?

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 08, 2005 Posts: 6

I left Vonage four months ago. I started getting replies to trouble service requests two months after canceling my service. Why is this? Four months later I am now getting mail on forums. Why is this?

Posts: 2251 · Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2006 8:01 pm Post subject: Re: Hello is there anybody home?

carylisa wrote:

Four months later I am now getting mail on forums. Why is this?

Details please.

Posts: 1424 · Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2006 8:47 pm Post subject:

I would guess that the poster is talking about this post about HP All-in-one fax machines.

hmoazed reopened a thread that had been dormant since Aug 15th. There seems to be a true spate of these resurrections over the past few days leading me to wonder of old threads should get automatically locked.

Posts: 2251 · Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2006 9:10 pm Post subject:

scerruti wrote:

...old threads should get automatically locked.

Looking into it.

Posts: 476 · Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2006 10:59 pm Post subject:

Poor Dan. We keep you hopping, don't we? Wink

You know we appreciate your work on the forums...

Posts: 1123 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: May 26, 2005 Posts: 1123

I think the danger in locking ALL old threads will result in an explosion of threads dedicated to answering locked threads. Maybe if people didn't turn on the "let me know when someone replies" button, they wouldn't have to worry.

Posts: 1424 · Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2006 7:33 am Post subject:

I don't agree. I think that many of the times we see these replies a new thread is actually deserved, the thread that spawned this thread for example.

Other times we see people responding to issues to say "me too", 4 to 6 months later.

In the few times that there is a need to reference the old threads that is easy enough to do with a link. We already see this all the time in responses to newbies who post before searching.

The real problem with reviving an old thread is that the issue documented in the old thread may have been solved in a subsequent thread, starting up an old thread can cause confusion for people who thought their problem had been resolved. It would be easy enough to keep an old thread open as long as no suitable solution had been found simply by updating the question once and a while, this is necessary anyway to bring it to people's attention.

In the ideal world computers would be smart enough to know when to lock a thread. There are some natural points, certain discussions are directly connected to some real world event, for example an outage. Other discussions are concluded with an authoritative post on the subject that is indisputed. But, looking for threads that have been idle for over a month or two is a good start.