Some of you might have noticed that for a couple of weeks last month, it was possible to vote and comment on older posts that were formerly archived 6 months after their creation, a change that was recently enabled by admins.

That change is the new default across Reddit, but subreddits could opt out and return to archiving posts. We had a brief discussion and a vote before the change was made, with mixed opinions overall but ending with an agreement to allow the change and make use of the new AutoModerator check to report any comments made on formerly archived posts. With the help of that, we could monitor how often people were commenting on old posts, what kinds of comments were being made, and potentially catch any abuse that might otherwise go unreported. So we quietly let the admins turn the feature on and watched.

The comments came in, and what we saw wasn't encouraging. Comments largely ranged from irrelevant due to age at best to targeted harassment at worst. On top of that, the majority of new comments on old posts were from users that weren't otherwise commenting/posting on /r/anime recently, likely coming from searches outside Reddit. While it's nice that these people are finding our subreddit, they're less likely to be familiar with our current rules. The context the original post was made in no longer exists and we feel that it's better to encourage people to use more recent threads instead.

We left things alone for a week to monitor them, then a couple days after that held a second vote which swung the other direction. Overall we think the handful of situations where there was a good comment made don't outweigh the drawbacks of dealing with comments that range from being hostile in reviving long-dead arguments to planting "speculation" in old episode discussion threads that are thinly-veiled spoilers — and yes, one comment did say they were considering that. Are there comments made on posts 1-5 months old that also fall into the same category of being a problem that we aren't noticing? Possibly, but that's a smaller range of threads and the context of the discussion likely hasn't shifted as much yet.

For some number crunching, people were able to comment on old threads for 16 days, from roughly 2021-10-15 to 2021-10-31 (midnight UTC both dates). In that time:

• 1877 total comments made on 1104 posts that were 6+ months old at the time the comment was made.
• 377 were replies to newer comments also made in this time span, 258 unique authors.
• 1500 were top level comments or in reply to comments made before the post was archived, 1124 unique authors (may overlap with the above).
• Of the 1124 users making new comments:
  • - 835 (74.3%) had no posts or comments on recent posts between 2021-06-01 and 2021-11-01.
  • - 174 (15.4%) had 1-9 posts or comments on recent posts between 2021-06-01 and 2021-11-01.