Topic: How long do threads stay active? (Page 1 of 1)

Would it be possible to lock threads so that after about a week of inactivity no one can add new messages to the thread?

I often save threads that have interesting disussions in them. I wait about a week for the activity in the thread to die down so I can save the complete thread. It has gotten so that often people will go back and add a new message to the thread several weeks or even several months after all activity in the thread has died down.

I also run into a problem with Photoshop threads where someone will post an image to illustrate a point they are trying to make. If I wait too long to save the thread, they take the images off their site and the thread becomes less useful. If people knew that a thread would be locked a fixed amount of time after the activity in the thread dies down, they would have a gage to use to decide how long to leave images on their site before removing them.



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-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

threads are moved to ->the sink after... 90 days I believe.
Provided there's an archive for the forum in question.
Everthing in the archives and ->the sink is locked.

quote:

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hyperbole said:
It has gotten so that often people will go back and add a new message to the thread several weeks or even several months after all activity in the thread has died down.

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and why is that a problem?

I can't give you any examples right now and I guess maybe it doesn't happen that often, but I know that there have been several times when I wanted to save a thread where people had posted images to give an example of a technique and by the time I got around to trying to save the thread (within a week to ten days of the start of the thread) the images had been removed from the poster's site and couldn't be viewed.

If the thread is describing a technique and the images are an integral part of the explanation, the thread becomes useless when the images disappear. I don't know if there is a good way to try to preserve the integrity of these threads because I know that it would add a lot to the storage space to try to save every image in the archive and on the other hand it is not reasonable to expect every person who posts an image to keep that image available for an indefinite amount of time.

Most people here seem to leave their images up long enough that it is not a problem. So maybe we just have to put up with the occasional times when some posts and then shortly remove their images from their web site.



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-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

Maybe I'm just being thick....

But I can't for the life of me find a corrolation between missing images and people posting in week-old threads.....

DL-44,

Probably there isn't a correlation.

I have noticed that the longer a thread stays up, the more likely people are to remove their images. If there is a thread I'm interested in saving to my hard drive because it gives an interesting technique, I usually wait until about a week after people have stopped posting to the thread before I save it so that I don't have to go back and re-save the thread when someone later adds another post.

If someone adds a post after that, I have to decide if the post is important enough to re-save the thread. Then I have to make sure all the images are in tact and if not save and restore the ones that are missing at the time I re-save the thread.

By waiting a week to see if someone will add more to the thread I increase the chance that some of the images will be gone from the thread by the time I save it.

I was just trying to figure out a way to encourage people to leave their images posted until the thread is archived, or something.

<DL-44 this-may-be-the-answer-to-your-question>
It seems to me that if people knew that the post could remain active for a certain time after the last post had been made to the thread, they might be more inclined to leave images available until activity in the thread had died down.
<DL-44 this-may-be-the-answer-to-your-question>

It might not have any effect, but I was just trying to start some discussion on how we could increase the integrity of threads that are going to be archived.

As I said in a previous post, it's not really a major problem. In fact I spent some time going through the archive trying to find out if the images had disappeard from the threads that are archived and I only found two or three threads that were affected by it. That may be because most posts (other than in the PhotoShop forum) are not really dependent on graphics. But it indicates that it's not a huge problem. Something that might be nice, but not worth taking time away from more pressing matters.



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-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.


(Edited by hyperbole on 04-16-2005 19:20)

Hum. I think my brain is now rattling around in my head.
This is the first time i have had a bit to sit down and read through some stuff, and I stumble upon this madness..

Thanks.

----| Asylum Quotes