Is it ok to reply to bump a topic that hasn't been replied to? If so after how long?
I am not a staff member, but given the fact, that old threads are auto-closed after 90 days or so, I believe it is okay to reply as long as it's possible.
Edit: Ah, sorry. It's about bumping own topics. I had necro-bumping in mind, since this something I deal with a lot more as a forum moderator. I'd say this kind of bumping is rather unwanted here, but I am not a forum moderator here.
The FAQ for this site says
Don’t post no-content replies.
Personally I ignore one and report after that. I don't know that I've ever seen a bump be effective in this community anyway.
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personal take - am not an admin.
Imho the topics here are not that frequent/numerous to be disappearing out of sight in matter of hours/1-2 days, so bumping topic once after a week is imho not obtrusive... (considering helpful people have typically own stuff to work on during week)
If that gets no reaction, people (that are imho incredibly helpful here, but may not be using every last/niche library/crate/problem) probably have nothing to respond either way.
edit: for more immediate/ad-hoc help, using Discord is imho good way to get some leads on the problem being addressed..
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I think the disappearing out of sight is the issue; views have pretty much stagnated. I won't use discord for many reasons but did originally ask in the unofficial Rust Matrix room with a similar lack of response
Personal observation:
Vast majority of the users of this forum fits into these 2 categories:
- Heavy user that browse the forum very frequently, and may actively engage in discussion.
- Light weight user that only come to forum when they encounter a problem.
Bumping won’t help with the first category. Since if they didn’t engage the first time, it has a very high probability they won’t engage this time. Mostly likely because they are not familiar with the topic, but not missing the topic when it’s on front page.
Bumping won’t help with the second category as well. Since they mostly likely don’t care about other topics.
It means that “disappearing out of sight” is not that much a issue. Bumping after like a week for once might be fine, since there’s still chance you get help. Just don’t bumping repeatedly. It’s high chance no one will/can engage after that. You might have better luck posting the problem elsewhere more focused on the specific area of your problem.
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So, if the general consensus is bumping is bad, what should I do?
Generally I'd recommend adding sufficient new information to tackle the issue at hand, if available. That will "bump" the topic but not violate the rule of empty posting.
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I interpreted this as including edits which is what I ended up doing, unfortunately that doesn't bring it back to the top of the list
I actually meant replying to yourself with new, relevant information to actually bring it back on top.
To me, this would be fine, if the new content adds new information to tackle the problem.
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Edits move the topic up but don't make it go from read to unread, from what I've observed. Unsure if it's all edits or edits to the most recent comment.
Strangely this thread has lots of comments.
Maybe your other topic did not interest many readers?
Or to be more positive...
I have posted questions here in the past that nobody commented on, so I just assumed my code was perfect and nothing could be suggested to make it better. Maybe the code in your post, (I assume the sqlx::FromRow thread ) was good enough and nobody had anything to suggest.
Only to the most recent reply, as far as I know, will an edit cause the topic to "move up" (i. e. get a more recent "bump date").
Though now... Looking into it, actually, I might be remembering outdated behavior, so my claim might be completely, wrong now. Things seem to be changing recently, starting with FEATURE: Do not bump topic on post edit by martin-brennan · Pull Request #34681 · discourse/discourse · GitHub (also see other discussion threads linked there) so I'm not actually sure myself what exactly the most current status quo behavior is like.
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