You don’t want to hide threads as sometimes authors come back to them and then can’t find them again. There have been cases where old games have been worked on at later dates.
There’s no reason to lock old game threads that haven’t been resurected by someone other than their author. Not sure why this is an issue?
I suppose that’s true, plus if people want to replay them they wouldn’t be able to find them.
…an issue? I merely brought up that old threads were being moved to top after being locked for being unused for so long, thus drawing attention to them. It’s not a huge problem by any means, it just seems counterproductive as per the reason behind creation of this thread.
I’m also curious as to how all of this works, thus I bring things like this up and discuss them from time to time.
Not sure why that’s happening. Should only be being locked if someone resurrects them as otherwise they just RIP, but maybe one of the mods was bored.
When drop box stopped working, a lot of people got upset they couldn’t replay their fav WIPs anymore. Best just to leave them be rather than hide them IMO.
@Jacic The act of locking these threads apparently counts as activity. From what I’ve seen this is a relatively new problem as of @Scooby_Doo creating this thread. It seems he unintentionally made the mods kick it into high gear. Lol.
I don’t think so? I’ve had my own threads bounced to the top when they’ve been manually locked for inactivity by people with mod powers in the past. Anyways, if it’s the automatic system that’s moving them to the top that’s a different issue, but I haven’t noticed it. Could be wrong though.
It could have been a correlation without causation situation. I saw 3… maybe 4 super old threads that were recently locked within the last couple of days. Not a lot obviously but enough to make me take notice, considering this thread was made, what… a week and a half ago?
Btw if my curiosity is leading me to beat a dead horse, let me know. I’m not great at picking up on that kind of thing. I like talking about this stuff so if I find a conversation interesting I often try to keep it going… possibly too much.
Just as a note, and I’m not completely sure if this is always the case, but I think just manually “locking” a thread in and of itself does not count as activity that pushes the thread up to the top of the queue or forum. I think leaving a message on the lock–our standard “PM us if you want this unlocked” or “closed for inactivity”–is what makes the thread act as if there’s a new post in it, pushing it to the top. I’ll test it on this, if you don’t mind!
Edit: That was actually stupid of me to do because I just posted on this thread, so it’s going to be at the top regardless…
Suggestion lock every thread that you see that has had no activity in a month would it be easier?
As Eiwynn noted, our current threads (the past several years to today) have a 2-month automatic lock on them that automatically closes threads that don’t have activity in 2 months. The exceptions to this are:
I don’t think reducing the lock to a month would help the issue, which isn’t really an issue until someone inadvertently revives a very old thread. I think a month is a bit short to lock something when authors have busy lives and etc. but mean to get back to their WIP in a few weeks!
Oh, hm, I guess I’m wrong about that, then! It could be that the forum software changed or I was being stupid, but I could have sworn I’ve locked things before without them showing up at the top. Or maybe it’s a mobile thing? Either way, helpful mods can sometimes go through the backlog and close threads preemptively to prevent people from accidentally reviving them. 
I do it myself from time to time! (Not to call myself helpful, lol.)
@rinari Oh shush, you’re very helpful. Honestly I think I just got lucky in catching it, because the top threads changes so often I easily could have missed it.
