Reply #256: Congrats on DU staying up so well; message to DUers: Is Your Thread Necessary?

[muriel_volestrangler]

I'm very impressed that DU stayed running at full speed, as far as I can tell, the whole night, with no apparent 'defcon' levels necessary.

DU thus managed to generate 20 pages of GD threads in perhaps 15 hours. And this throws up a problem: when so many threads are started in one night, existing threads can end up getting archived if no-one posts to them in those 15 hours. That's not a long time for a thread to be quiet. In at least one case, someone was unable to reply to a thread because it was archived 'underneath them', although it had been active within 24 hours.

So DUers, the next time there's a huge event, can help with this. This is how:

Don't start a new thread if your comment could easily be added onto an existing one.

Every time you start a thread, you increase the chances a good GD discussion from earlier in the day will get archived. It's not a problem normally - it takes a couple of days of inactivity for a thread to be archived. But on a popular night, it hurts the 'other stuff' that GD also has.

Perhaps a message like this could be added to the next Admin thread like this that's put up before a busy night?