As PeterT notes all necroposts or all forums aren't the same. Also necroposting is an option here at Mobilread and serves a valuable service for most all of the forums at Mobileread. However in some forums, calibre being one, necroposting often wastes users time.
In the Calibre forum about 20% of necroposts are left alone because the thread may get the responses the user needs because the topic is generic and folks subscribed may have the answers.
But in most of the cases of necroposting in the Calibre forum the original post has little to do with the new post since the original was referring to a version of calibre 50, 100, or 200+ versions out of date. This wastes the time of folks who see an apparent new thread pop to the top of a forum and post an answer to the original poster before they are aware that the post is a year plus old and was recently brought back from the dead. If the post is spotted early enough we move it to its own thread so the user gets the help s/he needs without any confusion.
However in most of the Mobileread forums reviving old threads have no such consequence.
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Originally Posted by ApK
I've seen several posters get slapped down rather hard by mods lately for necroposting. That is, posting to threads that have been inactive for several years.
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This is not new and has been handled similarly in the Calibre forum for 5 years.
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Originally Posted by ApK
Heck, it seems like it's okay to have one ancient zillion-page monolithic support thread that users are expected to plod through to see if their issue was mentioned two years ago on page umpteen-hundred-and-forty. If any threads should be forced into retirement and reborn in a new thread, it's those !
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I can't speak for other forums, but in calibre most of these are threads run by a developer for support on a specific plugin or related tool they created. In these cases the threads are valuable support and it is extremely rare that anyone is dinged for not seeing the answer to their question in post 140.
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Originally Posted by eschwartz
It depends on the thread. Very often, the necropost comes as a piece of advice that would have been useful years ago (possibly only applicable to an old version of software e.g. calibre) and posted with a complete disregard to whether or not anyone cares.
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Good example.