The most important thing is answer the question being asked or give the advice been sought and don't spam!
Another "thing" is to not resurrect dead threads that are 15 years old. I can't think of anything that will kill this site faster than that!
Did you do a search for "rubbish" by any chance? You just dragged up 5 dead threads with "rubbish" in the title..
The key is being polite, courteous, answering the question at all times and not to spam regardless to whether it is an 'old' or 'new' question. Also did not know you cannot answer in old threads in this forum.
There's no rule. You can reply to any thread, new or old. The home page of the forum has these old threads under "Popular" which tells me @digitalpoint doesn't care if old threads are being resurrected.
If he doesn't then he should. If a person clicks on this site and sees old 10-15 year old threads he/she will take a pass and go elsewhere. Nothing can be worse for an already dying site than this. We have enough problems attracting new members as it is. Whenever I have checked out a site I always check the thread dates to see if the site is current or not, as do most people.
Some forums auto-lock threads that are over a certain age (think sometimes the date of the last post in that thread might sometimes play a part)
Might not be a bad idea. The potential problem will be: one thread gets locked, another user starts a similar thread. Over time you will have a large number of similar threads. This happens now too, but locking threads would encourage it even more.
They have nothing to do with the replies or they don't want an answer to their thread. It was done intentionally to get more traffic and links from the forum website. But, these techniques are outdated used earlier in 2012.
Right you are, and this thread is from 2006. This thing ought to be locked and put out of it's misery.
You absolutely can, but you have to ask yourself first if the OP will still be interested in the answer and if it's likely that others will benefit from your answer. In this specific instance, way back in 2006 the OP wanted to know about Google Desktop which Wikipedia tells me was discontinued in 2011. The chances that 15 years later the OP is still using software made obsolete 10 years ago are nil.
For readers of this thread that can't make sense of it, here is what happened. The OP dragged up a useless thread from 2006. The mod removed it (the 2006 posts) and took this thing out of *General Chat* and has placed it here, make sense now? *To have left it as is without an explanation makes it all appear like "much ado about nothing". Talk about taking the subject out of context!