Thread: Please fix old posts disappearing from the forums

Old posts are disappearing from some forums once they reach a certain age. Look at "Plugins & Requests" http://forums.lotro.com/forumdisplay...s-amp-Requests. The parent forum page says 148 threads, but when you go to the subforum only 34 threads are there. Or "Future API Requests & Discussion" http://forums.lotro.com/forumdisplay...amp-Discussion. Its supposed to have 41 threads but you can only see 6. Most of the discussion is now unreachable. Posts older than 3 months are silently disappearing. Meanwhile, other sections of the forums have posts dating back to 2009 or earlier, so I know this can't be intentional.

I first noticed this with a post I made in the plugin forum: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...Plugin-Lyrical At some point the post disappeared from being visible in "Plugins & Requests", and I thought it had been deleted. Here is the weird part: I was able to find my post again by searching for "lyrical", and after I posted a new reply, it became visible again. Several months later, and it disappeared again. You can still access it from the link above, but it won't show up in the Plugin forum unless someone "bumps" the thread again. So the threads are still there, just disappearing from visibility after 3 months of no activity.

I looked at a bunch of different subforums and tried to compare the thread numbers. The LUA subforums seem to be the worst hit for some reason. 3 months is too short to start culling threads. I can understand if you'd need to trim the General discussion forum, but it makes no sense in sections with low traffic.

I filed a bug several months ago and the problem still persists. I don't know if the community is even aware of this issue. Turbine, please take a look at what is going on in the forums, as this is crippling to LUA developers and those who use plugins.

It seems even newer posts and threads, specifically ones critical of the company, disappear. That being said, have you checked your "My Preferences>My Forums Settings>General Settings>Thread Display" for how long threads stay active in your setting? I'm not sure what the default is, but it can be set for a very short length or up to a year.

Originally Posted by Abiyah

have you checked your "My Preferences>My Forums Settings>General Settings>Thread Display" for how long threads stay active in your setting?

Thank you Abiyah, I didn't even know about this setting. I looked and mine was set to "forum default", but changing it to "show all threads" allowed me to see the missing threads.

However I feel this is only a workaround, because most people wouldn't think to look for a setting.

It sounds like each subforum must have its own administrator set "forum default", and the default cutoff for LUA and other forums got set too low by accident. If so it should be an easy fix, and I ask again that a forum administrator please take a look.