Reviving old threads: Good things to know
Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2024 12:41 pm
Very many interweb forums discourage engaging with threads that are older than year, a month, or even a day by hidden it or making it impossible to comment.
This is definitely not the case on the ERE forums. The forums are now 14 years old. There's often gold to be found in old threads and anyone is strongly encouraged to peruse them and revive them by asking a question. This is often a better approach than starting a new thread on the same topic. Afterall, when it comes to good praxis and how to live well, we're dealing with age-old wisdom rather than new-information. Some of the original posters may still be around too.
Good practice: Revive old threads by asking questions relevant to that thread or adding information.
Bad practice: Bumping old threads you found interesting by writing *bump* in the hope that others find them interesting.
External search engines are the best way to dig up old forum nuggets. The internal search sucks because it just lists all hits for a given keyword in no particular order. As such it's restricted to words that are 4 letters or longer lest it catalogue every single forum post containing the word "the", which is pretty much every single post and you really don't want 250,000+ random results. To begin, search google using a string like "forum.earlyretirementextreme.com -earlyretirementextreme.com IRA". This targets pages that contains the word IRA which are on the forum but not on the blog (because of the minus sign).
This is definitely not the case on the ERE forums. The forums are now 14 years old. There's often gold to be found in old threads and anyone is strongly encouraged to peruse them and revive them by asking a question. This is often a better approach than starting a new thread on the same topic. Afterall, when it comes to good praxis and how to live well, we're dealing with age-old wisdom rather than new-information. Some of the original posters may still be around too.
Good practice: Revive old threads by asking questions relevant to that thread or adding information.
Bad practice: Bumping old threads you found interesting by writing *bump* in the hope that others find them interesting.
External search engines are the best way to dig up old forum nuggets. The internal search sucks because it just lists all hits for a given keyword in no particular order. As such it's restricted to words that are 4 letters or longer lest it catalogue every single forum post containing the word "the", which is pretty much every single post and you really don't want 250,000+ random results. To begin, search google using a string like "forum.earlyretirementextreme.com -earlyretirementextreme.com IRA". This targets pages that contains the word IRA which are on the forum but not on the blog (because of the minus sign).