MoFos, I seek your collective opinion on a particular matter.
As the site nears the end of its 7th year of operation, it has, inevitably, seen its share of duplicate threads. I, and the staggeringly capable moderators who have generously given of their time and energy, have done a good job of getting rid of them, I think. However, it seems the community at large has lost interest in this sort of thread policing, electing to let newer members revisit old topics like "Best villain" and "Favorite soundtracks."
So, my question is this: should we give into this as an inevitability, given the site's tenure? And if so, should we take certain steps to facilitate the process? A few ideas to streamline the whole thing:
As the site nears the end of its 7th year of operation, it has, inevitably, seen its share of duplicate threads. I, and the staggeringly capable moderators who have generously given of their time and energy, have done a good job of getting rid of them, I think. However, it seems the community at large has lost interest in this sort of thread policing, electing to let newer members revisit old topics like "Best villain" and "Favorite soundtracks."
So, my question is this: should we give into this as an inevitability, given the site's tenure? And if so, should we take certain steps to facilitate the process? A few ideas to streamline the whole thing:
- "Retire" old threads by closing them (with an explanatory post at the end, perhaps pointing to a newer instance of the same topic).
- "Retire" old threads by closing them and moving them to a special archival folder, where other such threads would be stored. This archival folder could possibly morph into a "Best of MoFo"-type thing, or at least "Most Popular Thread Topics."
- Leave all such threads open, and simply let moderators and helpful members continue to occasionally link people to older, related threads as they see fit.
- Tighten up and remove all duplicates, pointing users to the existing versions of such threads.