stupid forum policies

If you have visited other gaming forums on the internet, you must have witnessed contradicting forum rules at work.

Go to one well known forum and they strongly discourage a practice known as "necro-bumping" of old threads. Yet another well known forum actually encourages searching the forum archives and activating old threads as necessary, rather than cluttering the forum with repeat threads.

I have been to a well known forum that caters to Sega systems and games, and you will be chided by forum regulars (not even moderators, but mostly wannabe's) for something called "spamming", otherwise known as posting a new thread that even remotely duplicates subject matter from an existing thread. In fact, trolls will chide the offending thread creator about not using the forum's "search" tool to eliminate duplicate thread topics.

This is where I am at: "Necro-bumping" is not a crime, and I don't get the moderators at said site for coming down on "offenders", other than it makes the moderators feel somehow powerful and important in doing so. Requiring topic starters to comb through thousands of archived threads to avoid duplicate topics is also unreasonable and ridiculous by my own opinion.

Life is too short, live and let live. Honestly, I think some of those other forums need to get over themselves, kick out the trolls, and otherwise allow people some freedom.

I will get off my soap box now...

Rules on necro-posting vary a lot from forum to forum. On some forums, it is ok for the original poster to necro-post if they have something new to share. After all, they were the ones who started the thread. The problem with many of these rules is that search engines within forums are not 100% effective at finding old threads on a topic. So, you may end up creating a repeat thread because you didn't find the original one on the topic. I think people just need to relax a bit. Moderators can always merge topics if needed.