Necroposting

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First I must ask if I am permitted to post here?
If so, I want to know if it is allowed to post on old topics or not, what English speakers call Necroposting.

You are permitted to post anywhere on WP.

While there are no firm and defined rules here about necroposting it is generally considered bad netiquette and we would prefer to discourage it - mainly because old threads are resurrected with posts responding to earlier ones made by people who no longer visit WP, and also because there is usually nothing to be gained from resurrecting old and lengthy threads where a topic has already been discussed to death.

We leave it to the judgement of individual posters who we hope would have checked whether the person or the topic they wish to respond to could be reasonably described as "current".

Has Alex ever considered an auto-lock for dead threads. A pattern that I see is that a new poster will go back into the archives, resurrect an old thread via posting, and then be teased by subsequent posters for necro posting. There are no firm rules so a newcomer has no way of knowing how old is too old or which topics have been discussed to death. Ultimately, the resurrected thread is then locked by a moderator.

Instead of waiting for an old thread to be resurrected, the new poster teased, and then the thread gets locked for being dead, how about an auto-lock that would automatically lock a thread that had not been posted in for X amount of time (a year?). This would preserve old threads for reading by newcomers and also preserve old yet active threads for posting that are posted in with regularity.

I realize that only Alex can do this.

Are you talking THIS forum; or others?

That doesn't happen much here...

^ It would apply to any forum on WP.

Janissy, that's actually a good idea but I don't know if it's ever been considered.
An auto-lock after one year of posting inactivity seems reasonable to me, and I've long thought that if an old topic does become current again it's better to start a fresh thread about it with new ideas from the current membership.
An automatic locking, including an explanatory message for the lock, would be a nice way of nudging the creation of something much more useful instead of allowing the resurrection of a dusty old discussion.

When I first joined WP, I used to necropost a lot. Not on purpose. I was just still getting used to WP and was unsure of how to use it correctly. I didn't know there was a forum index, and I always used to just use the custom search box for anything that popped to mind, and the topics would come up and I would just post from there, regardless of the date. Then as time went on, I realised there was a forum index so I learnt to use it properly.

But at the time, I got angry posters attacking me for bumping extremely old topics, like in 2010 I bumped topics sometimes from 2004.

Another forum I visit has an automated system that posts a warning in the thread if there is a long time gap between posts. In an industry forum this can be useful as it keeps continuity.

On a more community based forum such as WP there is little need to allow old posts to be resurrected (if there are a few with a good reason the moderators could override the system) so locking old posts would seem the better option.

Better to reuse a thread than to make 48 new ones unless they are over 100 pages long.