I rarely find that a posting following up on an old thread is useful, and I wonder if that practice should be discouraged on StataList.

By "old," I mean threads older than (say) a few weeks, and certainly threads older than six months or so. I seem to find myself all too often digging through a long thread from a year ago, where information gained by the new posting's relation to the old ranges from not very helpful to actively irrelevant. Even if relevant, going to the bottom of a mult-posting thread occupying multiple pages is not convenient. To me, a new posting with a linked reference to an old thread would be much eaiser to read than repetition of a long old thread with someone new problem at the end. Of course, there are situations in which a new posting needs to be interspersed with the old conversation, but I think they are relatively rare. Those latter situations typically involve postings by more experienced and knowledgeable participants, and I don't think those are commonly a problem.

However, what I think is more typical is that relatively new participants search the archive of the list, find something they think is similar to their problem, and presume that their new posting is expected to be a followup if it has any terms/concepts in common with an old one.

Do others here have a similar reaction to the typical followup posting (perhaps not)? If so, I'd think that we could include recommendations in the FAQ (don't laugh too hard) not to post one's question as a followup to a posting older than a few weeks. In the extreme, such followups could presumably be made impossible by tweaking something in the forum software settings.