What are your views (as an administrator) on members bumping older topics that have been inactive for lengthy periods of time? If you have a policy specifically relating to such an action, what are your specific rules and/or restrictions? If a member were to continuously bump these topics after receiving a warning, what would you do in response?
We have no policy regarding it. In fact, about every two months, the users go through and bump a whole bunch of threads. We even have an official Bump Week on the site. Of course, this is all supposed to be done in our Lounge, where they are allowed to play. However, bumping is allowed in the other forums to get attention to a thread or torrent also, but only to get attention, not to play. We've never had any problems with bumping being misused in our almost five years.
My members rarely bump threads... and on the rare occasions they do, somebody inevitably asks "what's a bump?"
I find bumps to be beneficial rather than having a member make a new topic. Most forums nowadays simply merge the new with the old, therefore bumping it.
I don't mind bumping it can bring up a topic that has been buried to newer users and stir some more discussion.
I completely agree. I don't see what the big issue with bumping thread is, unless somebody is doing it for the heck of it. If it continues the thread and sparks some ongoing discussion, than all-the-more power to the "bumper"! :lol: If I recall correctly, I've seen some forums that automatically lock threads after x weeks of inactivity, which is fairly extreme in my opinion.
That's ridiculous - I fail to see the point in doing something like that. Let's say that a member wants to appropriately participate in a discussion, but due to it's age, the thread is locked. He/she would then have to re-create the discussion by creating a new thread. This is not really viable - think of all of the repetitively posted topics. It'd be an organizational nightmare.
Thread bumping is fine if done reasonably, we had a member sign up on our forums to go right back to the beginning of the forums and bump every single thread on the very first page, when new users were signing up they were posting in these ancient threads and a few asked why there was no new threads in this forum. We warned this member to not carry on doing this as it was quite destructive. It is a shame us admins dont have an option to unbump a thread without deleting the post
whenever I feel like I have to bump a thread that's been ignored, I never just reply with *bump* if I can help it. I always try to include new information about the situation or a description of what consequences not having an answer to the problem is causing.
