Reviving old threads: Good things to know

[jacob]

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).

[loutfard]

May I suggest using a slightly different search term: "site:forum.earlyretirementextreme.com IRA"? Shorter and more precise.

Also, more privacy friendly search engines than google exist. They work eminently well for this purpose. Duckduckgo.com comes to mind, but it's not the only one.

[AlpineTR]

Speaking of old threads, does the site/forum have a backup in case (heaven forbid) Jacob no longer wishes/is able/etc. to run the forum? As a newish member, I hope I'm not speaking out of turn, but I've been reading the site and forum for 15 years and it's influenced me in many positive ways. There is so much practical wisdom that would be lost for future generations if the site/forum shut down.

[jacob]

There's regular data backup in case the system goes down. I'll find a successor before I abdicate the throne.

[Oey]

is there a way to easily compile the "best of" in the forums? seems like it would be nice to have.

[mathiverse]

@Oey: Best of the ERE forum!