What's with all the years-old threads being exhumed?

[AreTheyTheLemmings?]

A propos nothing, but I have noticed threads from years ago being revived in the past couple of weeks. Is something happening at the back-end, or is it just someone reading through old threads and adding comments years after the threads went dormant?

[cocacola]

Probably some new users poking around and finding interesting past-topics to reply to.

The visuals on this forum is all default phpBB, so it's not exactly intuitive for new users to see the date of a post.

It would be great to have some upgrades, visual and plug-ins (especially the Search function!), for this forum. Maybe increasing the font size for us older folks. This is a "RetireJapan" forum, after all

[adamu]

Bots/people posting to get trusted and then go back and edit in links to marketing sites etc. once people have forgotten about the posts.

[RetireJapan]

Bots/people posting to get trusted and then go back and edit in links to marketing sites etc. once people have forgotten about the posts.

Do report any posts like that please -I'm not always going to see them.

[Max]

Probably some new users poking around and finding interesting past-topics to reply to.

Guilty as charged, your honour. It's a fair cop, guv.

[beanhead]

i think we give him/her the benefit of the doubt. Doesn't seem like a bot

[Mrblobby]

Bots/people posting to get trusted and then go back and edit in links to marketing sites etc. once people have forgotten about the posts.

Can/do bots do that now?

I used to run a quite popular forum community. Before turning it off, about 10 years ago, we were increasingly having to deal with all sorts of nonsense - both from automated/spam stuff and actual people. Dealing with it all was very stressful. Turning it off was a very difficult decision, as I (created and) loved it and many other people loved it too.

Looking back at those days I do wonder why I put up with it for so long.
I can imagine things are way worse now.
Good luck Forum-running folks.
I feel for you!

[zeroshiki]

Because most of us grew up in the early internet, we do find comfort in these forums but the kids nowadays do discord. Those are better at fighting bots (not perfect of course) at the expense of leaving any kind of structure in conversations as is the nature of chat rooms.

[RetireJapan]

Because most of us grew up in the early internet, we do find comfort in these forums but the kids nowadays do discord. Those are better at fighting bots (not perfect of course) at the expense of leaving any kind of structure in conversations as is the nature of chat rooms.

I went on Discord for a bit with one of our courses.

Never again!

Had no idea what was going on

[RetireJapan]

Can/do bots do that now?

This editing previously posted things is very sneaky indeed.

I read all posts, so will usually catch new spam, but there is no reason (or way) to go back and reread the entire forum regularly.

I dread to think of what is going on back there...