Hey everybody. I know very few people will bother to read this, but nevertheless it has to be said.

Don't necropost.

I'm sure many/most of you have heard this before, or at least heard something along the lines of "Holy mother of necropost," and been able to discern what it means. However! Too many people still seem to take weird pleasure in doing it.

Firstly, in case you don't already know, necroposting is commonly known as the practice of posting replies to old forum threads that haven't had any activity for a couple of weeks or more. However, necroposting can refer to the posting of meaningless replies to old threads that add nothing to the conversation.

Why is this an issue?

As I'm sure you're all aware, PMC have sidebars that have a scroll with the fifteen thread posts that have been updated most recently on. When you necropost, PMC bumps these conversations to the top of the scroll bar which means space that could be used for relevant, interesting topics are now being used to discuss something that had fallen out of interest. Keep in mind that this is okay in the Community Challenges and Servers subsection. "Necroposting" on inactive threads in those categories will simply bump it to the top of their respective categories. However, there are still limitations on this and I will return to that thought later.

In addition, a more common form of necroposting that I see is people who click on forum threads that are no longer being discussed. This could be because the topic was once relevant to current events but is now not, the question had been answered, nobody gave a crap about the topic, or a whole host of other reasons. Replying to these threads without adding anything to the conversation is also a form of necroposting. This means that you cannot just quote what someone else said and add, "yeah i agree," because that is bumping a topic that nobody clearly cares about any more into the recent forums list.

That's not to say that you can't go around posting on threads that aren't in the recent forums list. In fact, it would be pointless if you didn't! Just try to keep in mind that you generally shouldn't update threads more than a week or so old unless either a) new information has surfaced on this topic and you think it would be relevant and people should know or would care about it, or b) it's a contest thread or you're keeping multiple interested parties on PMC updated about your epic Minecraft cruise that you'll be hosting in March of 2017 or something along those lines. And please don't pointlessly add something to a thread. I see so many cases of this and it bothers me so much.

In short, use common sense, guys. I thought this should have been obvious, but apparently that is *sigh* not the case. Use good judgement when you're posting replies to threads that seemed to have fallen out of interest and you should be okay.

But wait, there's more.

Really quickly, I just want to talk about bumping things. For those of you that are new to forum lingo or for some reason don't know, bumping a post is when you add something pointless to the bottom of posts if you are recruiting someone for something or trying to advertise something or anything along those lines. This is usually done with messages such as, "anyone still interested," or "we still need builders!" or, classically, "bump." Bumping things is not the same thing as necroposting. Bumping things is okay because you are looking to get something from someone and that needs to be seen.

However:

PMC actually has a rule on bumps. Yes, that's right. Your number of bumps are being controlled. According to the PMC rules:

"Do not bump more than once in a 24 hour period. A "bump" is a post that does not contribute to the thread at hand, and whose aim is to move a thread to the top of the recent posts in the forum (ex. "Anyone?", "Still need help!", "Hello?", "Bump"). Any reply can bump a thread however. You should only bump a thread if 24 hours has passed since the last post/reply, including the original post, regardless of if the post was yours or if it was or wasn't a "bump"."

This does not mean that you cannot post anything on a thread unless it's been 24 hours since the last post. This just means that you can't post anything solely to make more people see the thread unless 24 hours have passed. It really pisses me off when people do that, because it is explicitly stated in the PMC rules that this is not allowed, and the PMC rules is required reading before forum posting. So please, don't excessively bump anything.

Hopefully this will decrease the number of pointless bumps and necroposts on the forums. Please pass this message along to your friends and scrubs who do things like this. Thanks, and have a wonderful day of PMC.