Ghost thread

I've seen it happen in a couple of ways.

Occasionally, a misconfigured news server at somebody's site will "burp", and redistribute a bunch of articles that have been sitting in a disk spool directory for several years (e.g. they boot a machine for the first time in forever, or restore an old disk image from a backup). Since the Article-IDs on these are so old that they have "aged out" of almost every ID database, they aren't detected as being duplicates, and so are redistribute across USENET as if they were new.

More frequently, somebody using a Web interface to a USENET archive with a very long memory (i.e. Google Groups) will do a search for a keyword of interest to them, see an article which seems relevant, and post a followup... not noticing that the article to which they are replying is five or ten years old. Since their followup is a new article it's distributed normally, and appears to "resurrect" the dormant discussion thread.

Interesting. Thanks, Lenny

Four hours before you asked this question, someone had posted to your original mower thread bumping it back to the front page.

BTW, did you ever fix that mower?

I think that we got it going and then shortly afterwards my son blew it up. I seem to remember a bucket of mangled parts. It eventually became a science project. Lenny

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com forklarede den 27-02-2015:

Some fool reading the newsgroup at google groups instead of using a proper newsreader answered to the thread?

It is not unusual to see replies to 15 year old messages.

I wish google would add a "Enter age of message you are replying" capcha, to avoid answers to people probably long gone from the thread/group.

Leif

Not to mention, this world.

As far as I know Google groups does not allow replies to messages older than 60 days.

You may be right. That's too short. Another reasons to read posts directly.

Nope. I just replied to a message from myself dated 20. april 2006 kl.

Google groups didn't complain at all.

Leif

Originally it was thirty days, which is reasonable.

Then they changed the interface, to make it more useful for their "groups", and they put in a bug that allowed replies to old messages.

I know I complained, I hope others did, and soon it was fixed, back to no replies for posts older than 30 days.

Then another iteration of the interface, and they put the bug back in.

I didn't complain, I was tired, and so I insult idiots who reply to old messages.

Now it's years later, and the bug is still there.

Michael

Why does it bother you if people reply to old messages?.

Many newsgroups have regulars who post and stay around reading 5, 10, 20 years later. And many other people come in late, like this week, find an old post and have a question or comment about it. Why shouldn't they post?

And even if the OP never sees that reply, other people will.

There are problems with people who don't know how to quote, who jump in the middle without saying what they're replying to, or who are just stupid or piggish, but those kinds of replies occur in the week after an OP also. They're not a problem BECAUSE they are 31 or 61 or 731 days later.

I suppose there are reasons google might not want late replies, but why would a consumer object?