Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2007/01/22/disneyland-wait-in-f.html
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Fun fact: the usual way for Discourse (this forum software) to integrate into an external blog is to have a new forum thread be automatically created the first time somebody views each post on the blog site.
This has an amusing side-effect, in that it doesn’t really matter when a blog post was written; the first time somebody views it after the Discourse site goes live, a new thread gets created for it and bumped up to the top of the bbs. Even if the blog post was ten years old.
All of which tells us… that decade-old article has just been read for the very first time since the bbs launched. We don’t know who read it, but somebody did. And nobody had until about six hours ago.
Of course, the worst thing is that when this sort of thing happens, some irresponsible person inevitably turns up to explain how and why the thread appeared so long after the blog post was written, in an effort to be helpful. And as a result, that response pushes the thread about the ancient blog post back to the top of the front page again, cluttering up the front page all over again!
Shameful!
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Personally, I don’t get why we’re always in such a mad rush to identify and close these old topics. When they’re outdated once-timely news stories, that’s one thing, but more often than not, these ghost posts from the past are still interesting enough to deserve some commentary. If they’re not, then they sink back out of sight quickly enough for lack of interest. But sometimes they’re still worth gabbing about. Why do we always rush to ask Falcor to close them?
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I think it’s less about Falcor closing them then it is to warn others that this isn’t something pressing and new that they should be aware of. How often do we see old new float to the top of the Facebook feed or whatever and then comment on it, only to find out it’s seven years old?
For me, seeing “time leak” means that this isn’t new and fresh, no matter how interesting it might be.
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Can’t tell you how many times I’ve found an answer to a question on a forum in a thread where someone had answered months or years after the original post and the rest of the thread was then filled with people whining about “necro’d threads”.
Sometimes the past is still relevant. Sometimes people are still looking for that info. Never been able to understand why people get so apoplectic about it. Just have to assume that there’s some mental disorder - mnemophobia maybe, that makes people uncomfortable and hostile. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Has anybody here been to Disneyland recently? Do you remember how many queues you had to wait in to get into the park?
It’s been twenty years since my last visit, so this article is more up-to-date than me… but I’m pretty sure there weren’t five queues back then.
From the article, these five queues are:
- The (driving) queue to get your car into the parking structure.
- The queue to get onto a tram to get from the parking structure to the front gates.
- The queue to get through the security checkpoints.
- The queue to buy tickets at the ticket booth.
- The queue to actually enter the park with your newly purchased ticket.
From my memory of twenty years ago, I pretty clearly remember queues #1, #4, and #5. I’m pretty sure that at that time, there were just big open parking lots, not concrete structures. And I feel like we just walked directly from the lot to the front gate, rather than taking a tram… but maybe my memory is glossing over that.
Of course, that visit was several years before 9/11, so security checkpoints weren’t a thing yet. And the other queues were short enough not to leave me with a strong impression of waiting in lines. (This visit was on a cold Tuesday morning while school was in session, so the park was pretty empty; an experience which I don’t hesitate strongly to recommend. I think we’d gone on nearly every ride in the park before noon.)
Anybody been there more recently who can update us on the modern state of the queues?
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But shouldn’t that mean that any post, no matter how old, will have a forum thread when one looks for it from the boingboing.net side by clicking on comments?
Or are the threads being closed, and later, when no one is watching, devoured???
Well, that’s how it works on my Discourse install. Doesn’t even require clicking on the ‘comments’ link to create the topic; merely viewing the page with javascript enabled is enough to do create the thread if one doesn’t already exist.
But with that said, I just checked it here by viewing an old 2005 article, and it doesn’t seem to be doing anything. So my whole theory is pretty much invalidated. Never mind! They seem to have a cleverer integration than mine. 
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It wouldn’t bug me at all if that were the case. Someone could simply comment that they noticed the date on the article’s URL indicates that it’s not a new article, and subsequent readers would know. But instead, they always @-mention Falcor to come on over and lock the thread, so even if someone (like me) would maybe still like to comment, tough shit, it’s locked. I just see no useful or compelling reason to do that, and many, many times I’ve come across one of these zombie topics that I would have liked to comment on, but couldn’t because someone else thought, for whatever reason, that any outdated article should receive no further discussion. Why do people do that, rather than just mentioning the date discrepancy without bothering a mod about it?
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I think we’re just trying to be helpful. I don’t think the regulars who usually catch it are opposed to giving the time leaks the same five day comment period as new topics. I’m not against it anyway.
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I certainly understand the urge to help out our draconic buddy. But these topics are often interesting (which may be why you, too, clicked on it, unless you’re simply a BBS completist), and in fact, since they so often pop up precisely on their 10-year anniversary, I have heard that one reason for their presence might be that CD (or maybe MF) sends out (tweets? I dunno) a “greatest hits” link to an article from That Date In History, which then, as @mewse says, gets its own BBS post since those old articles all predate Discourse and never had a BBS post before.
So anyway, if indeed those articles were mentioned on their anniversary, it’s probably the case that whoever did so curated the Best Posts from back then, which, if anything, makes them even more interesting to discuss.
Can we please not instantly leap to notify Falcor that there’s another old article to shut down?
@LDoBe, since you were the dude this time, whaddaya think? Any objections?
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There… Are… Four… Lines!
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More my insomnia likes to wake me up in the middle of the night when fewer new articles seem to be popping up. But yeah, I think we should try it out.
Poll created…
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