[E. Shaun Russell]

Back in the 90s and 2000s I remember being a member of a few forums where "thread necromancy" was a real problem: someone would come along and post on a thread that had been dormant for several months or even a few years, and that person would catch major flak for it.

I'm not sure thread necromancy is much of a bugbear anymore, since "netiquette" itself seems to have faded away. But I can't deny that this Eratosphere thread caught my attention for a couple of related reasons, the first being the sheer amount of time between the last post and the one that bumped it (over twenty-one years!), and the second being a reminder that Eratosphere has been around a heck of a long time -- quite literally half my lifetime at this point. The thread above was the 190th thread ever posted on the site. The forum statistics we see in the side panel are a bit skewed due to deleted threads etc., and the actual number of threads here is closer to 35000 now.

There's no real purpose to this new thread other than to reflect a bit, and to wonder aloud: can anyone recall seeing a thread unintentionally resurrected longer than twenty-one years after the previous post? I certainly can't...

[Christine P'legion]

I'm surprised at this, just because with the amount of 'pruning' I've seen in the workshop subforums I somehow assumed that the rest of the forum was similarly treated. But of course, no reason for that to be the case.

Twenty-one years is a record for me too, I think, but I play on online rpg that dates to the early aughts and also runs a bb forum and it's not unusual to see a thread necro'd after five years or more. There's at least one thread that's been continuously running since 2008; it has 141 pages and 8,417 replies! Personally, I love it. If there's new information to add or people want to (re)open an interesting discussion... well, why not?