I’ve been recategorising old Teonn posts back into their category (many old groups have ended up in the general “archive” category" instead). Most of the time this is invisible, but in less than 10% of cases Discourse thinks its a new post and bumps it to the top of the “latest” queue.
Sorry, everyone. Just ignore the thread necromancy; its old stuff from 2010-13 and hasn’t changed at all.
Its editing the posts to have tags that does this. Regular recategorising shouldn’t (I’ve done a lot of this myself).
Except its inconsistent about that too (I did 200 threads last night to reconstruct the Teonn category. All were tagged, but less than 10% ended up being “new”).
Either way: I will be more careful about tagging old stuff.
That’s interesting.
Did you use the same technique to tag them? From what I can tell there are two ways:
I’d assume the second would cause a post to be marked as new, but the first wouldn’t. This may require testing…
Testing results: on the post I tried this on, neither of them resulted in necromancy.
I wonder if it has to do with how a post was formatted? Editing a post might cause it to switch formats. Though a quick look at the newly living posts shows very little in common. In fact the only similarities seems to be:
I suspect its something to do with the 0 replies count then.
I was consistently editing the title field. But for single-post threads, it may have interpreted that as a post-edit?
It doesn’t seem to matter which you use. Topics that have replies don’t get bumped on edit. Topics that have no replies get bumped on edit (I just confirmed this hunch with another post). It might be done on purpose to increase the visibility of topic stubs that were missed?
Argh. A bit of a problem for those using “latest” view then. OTOH, you can suppress the entire problem by muting the whole “archive” category.
Further testing: Recategorisation from the category view doesn’t cause necromancy, but editing from the topic view does.
Its, apparently, when the final post in a thread is edited: https://meta.discourse.org/t/editing-tags-shouldnt-bump-the-topics-timestamp/34871/4
Darn, there I was thinking Diatribe had suddenly gotten popular again 
A sudden resurgence of Teonn nostalgia, perhaps? 
The scary thing is that that’s only recovered less than half of the Teonn board. Archive.org lists over 450 threads in it…
I’m assuming that recategorising closed posts was causing the crashes yesterday?
Would make sense to me. There were some pretty neat moments in it.
A bit more necromancy, sorry. OTOH, the Knightshade archive has now been completely reconstructed.
Edit to add: and also Chrono Continuum.
It doesn’t cause necromancy if you do it in bulk, rather than a thread at a time.
I’m not sure what your view looks like, but in mine… in categories, and in search, there is a toggle above the listings. When you click it you can see a bunch of checkboxes. Checking a checkbox produces a button on the right of the screen. There are options in there to change category in bulk. Do you have this option?
I just tested with another account, and it looks like the answer is no. That’s a shame.
On the other hand, moderators do. I’ve granted you moderator access to make thread categorisation easier.
Thanks. I’ve found it on “search”, so hopefully no more necromancy.
Added: Tested it on “Nibelungen”, and it works! Also, if anyone is interested, here’s how much there still is to do:
Archive restoration is largely complete. There’s a few stray posts - some 33AR Gypsies who apparently lack a Taverna to call home, and a handful of missing posts from St Wolfgang’s, but pretty much all of the old public archives are now in the right place. So if you enjoyed St Wolfgang’s, Teonn, Chrono Continuum, Multiverse, or any of the other older games, you can read about them again.
There is a taverna, but the taverna has very exclusive visibility.
