New Forum Feature: Auto-Bump

MSE_Stephen

Hi everyone,

Our forum is being updated with some great new automation features. There are a few available now, with some great ones to come in 2025.

To start, we're going to try rolling out our very first automation - Bump unanswered after 2 days:

If a new thread hasn't received a first reply after 2 days, it will be bumped to the top of the board.

This means that you may sometimes see some threads at the top of a board even though they don't have a new reply.

Please let us know in this thread if you have any feedback, or you see any issues this causes.

One-Eye

Not needed and definitely not wanted on Competitions Time.

(because on the comps forums the vast majority of threads only ever have a single post and never get a reply)

MikeJXE

Oh dear more problems 

Neil_Jones

There might be a reason why a post doesn't get a response.  Bumping it up is not really helping anybody and used to be considered poor forum etiquette.

In some cases you can bump it until the cows come home and it'll never get a response.

user1977

MSE_Stephen said:

If a new thread hasn't received a first reply after 2 days, it will be bumped to the top of the board.

And then what? Bumped again?

I'm comfortable with posters being allowed to bump their own threads if they're really bothered about it. Otherwise they can die a death (the threads, not forum members...).

Sea_Shell

Hmm

Not sure what actual benefit that will have tbh.  OPs can bump themselves if they've been "overlooked".

If just one response leads to a non-bump, this may still leave the thread "unanswered", if that reply is along the lines of...

"Sorry, didn't want to read and run.  Hope you get the answers to your questions" 😉

MSE_Stephen

One-Eye said:

Not needed and definitely not wanted on Competitions Time.

(because on the comps forums the vast majority of threads only ever have a single post and never get a reply)

We're aware this would be a bad idea for the Competitions Time forum, and have no plans to add it there.

In fact, we've had the ability to auto-bump for some time - but only site-wide. We had to wait for the ability to do it by category before using, specifically so we could exclude Comps Time

MSE_Stephen

Neil_Jones said:

There might be a reason why a post doesn't get a response.  Bumping it up is not really helping anybody and used to be considered poor forum etiquette.

In some cases you can bump it until the cows come home and it'll never get a response.

user1977 said:

And then what? Bumped again?

As the Forum Team can check all recent threads that have received no replies, it's really disheartening to see a post where a user has taken a great deal of time to add a detailed question about something they really need help with, only to get no reply. It's especially disheartening when it's a newbie. We often get questions emailed to us, and we have to reply that we can't give individual advice, while promoting the forum as a fantastic place to get help with their questions.

If a post hasn't received a reply just because it's been missed, we'd love to get it more attention. 

The auto-bump should only affect any post once. (Though if we accidentally cause any post to be bumped more than once as we add more rules, please let us know.)

As an early indication that this feature shouldn't be disruptive, it has bumped 2 posts since activation last Wednesday (activated on 10 boards).

EssexHebridean

A very useful feature for DFW where just occasionally at fast moving times posts do slip to the bottom of the page and then out of sight, and of course there we often have OP’s who aren’t really in the mindset to feel they can bump their thread themselves - indeed, no replies can feed in to the feeling of “I’m beyond help!” 

user1977

I see this is now in effect, but have noticed the auto-bumped threads seem to appear as permanently "unread" even if you've opened them - can that be fixed?

MSE_Stephen

user1977 said:

I see this is now in effect, but have noticed the auto-bumped threads seem to appear as permanently "unread" even if you've opened them - can that be fixed?

Thanks for letting us know. 
I've fed that back to our provider to see if we can get that fixed.