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Say I post a thread with a question that i need an answer for, and no one answers it. Can I post a reply on it, just to bump it so people see it?

There are no rules against it per se. You can only really "bump" a thread every 24 hours or so. Since if you try to post immediately or soon after another one of your posts it auto-appends into the already existing post.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Like so.


The Swap Shop forum has rules against bumping posts. But that rule pertains only to the forum itself.


So yes. You can "bump" a thread. But only once a day, unless someone else posts first. In which case a bump is likely to be unnecessary since the other persons post will have bumped it for you and may have answered your question.

A 'bump' post is considered a spam post (there is no intrinsic value in a post that just says 'bump' or 'why aren't people responding to me?'), and is therefore not allowed, which is why we implemented the auto-append: to prevent it from happening for the most part.

In the swap shop forum you are allowed to bump, but only once after 4 days.

In all other forums you are expected to be replying to someone else's response or adding something of significance to the thread if you are posting in it, even if it is beyond the auto-append period of time.

I can understand a bumped thread in OT being seen as not worth replying to, but what about forums like YMDC, or Army Lists? There's only so much you can say in those situations, and the opening post usually has all the information needed for a discussion to start.

If there are no responses after a decent time period (a day, at least, with the speed those forums move), and you've nothing else to say that you haven't already said, then would a user be expected to create a new thread instead of 'bumping' their current one?

If not, is there anything that you could recommend someone add to any such threads that would both 'bump' the thread up, but not be classed as spam?

Not really?

You'd have to wait 24 hours minimum anyway though, and hardly any threads here go without a reply in a day's time...

 Avatar 720 wrote:
I can understand a bumped thread in OT being seen as not worth replying to, but what about forums like YMDC, or Army Lists? There's only so much you can say in those situations, and the opening post usually has all the information needed for a discussion to start.

If there are no responses after a decent time period (a day, at least, with the speed those forums move), and you've nothing else to say that you haven't already said, then would a user be expected to create a new thread instead of 'bumping' their current one?

If not, is there anything that you could recommend someone add to any such threads that would both 'bump' the thread up, but not be classed as spam?

If you haven't received any replies in the time it takes for your thread to fall off the first page of the forum on Dakka (given that we show a LOT of threads on each page), then the reality is either that your topic is not worthy of discussion (which does happen) or more likely, you didn't put the time into writing your initial post in a way that engages readers and encourages them to reply.

If the latter is the situation, then your follow-up 'bump' post would be to re-phrase your initial post in a much better/engaging format, hopefully adding more information and/or more direct questions that you're looking for other people to respond to.

So if your thread was a YMDC post and you got no replies, you probably didn't include the appropriate rules references in your post (so people don't have to go look them up themselves) and you maybe didn't explain exactly why you think the issue is confusing or important to discuss, etc. So adding those kinds of things to your second post (or just simplifying/rephrasing your question a better way) are completely fine.

Similarly, with an army list post, too many people just post their army list and then ask people 'what they think' or 'how do you think this will do against X', instead of taking the time to write out some very specific questions that people can easily hop into the thread and answer. So again, secondary questions like that can be added as an additional post to try to get people to respond.

In either case this wouldn't be considered bumping (spam), because you would have clearly taken the time to add new content to the original post, as opposed to just doing the bare minimum 'spam' post to get your thread back to the top of the forum.

Ah, yakface, you eternal awesome.