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Hi everyone! We heard your concerns regarding the necro rule and page limits, and have made a few changes to hopefully help clear up any confusion as well as keep the forums organized.

Introducing [npc=forumbot]! This little bot (created by the always amazing ) will be closing up old threads before they are posted on from now on. We understand that part of the frustration with the rule is posting on a thread only to have it locked afterward, so we hope that this will help with that.

When a thread has reached the necro limit, ForumBot will post without bumping and lock the thread. To start, we will be piloting it manually, and only in the Gold Accounts and Entertainment forums, so don't worry if you see something that is over the necro limit that hasn't been locked just yet. After this initial testing period, ForumBot will do its job automatically at the same time every night in all applicable forums.

We've also updated the Necro rule to include this and be a little clearer on the time limit for specific forums. The necro limit has also been bumped up to six months instead of three for most forums. Any exceptions may be found in the rule itself.

With this, we have also updated our Spam rule! If you wish to create a new thread on a topic you've already created a thread for, you must wait for the original to be locked by the ForumBot, or for your thread to reach the second page of the forum it was posted in. (Note that this is a loosening of the old rule, which required that a thread reach the third page.)

We hope this helps ease some of the frustration with using the forums! If there are any issues with this, we expect they'll become apparent once we start using the system. Please note that we have updated the rules center to reflect the above changes, but we are working on updating our stickies to reflect both of these changes as well. In addition to this, we are looking at what we can do to simplify some of our rules, and have prioritized a few future projects based on this. Additional stickies updates and improvements will roll out with some of those future changes, and we should have some more updates to this tune in the coming weeks. We appreciate everyone's patience and feedback on this. :)

We haven't posted this as an announcement/news post because this is a trial run of both ForumBot and the rules tweaks. Once ForumBot is operating autonomously and we're certain that the rules tweaks are working well/as intended, then we'll feel more comfortable posting something more official on it. :)

As for locking your own stuff up, that's for private forums only, and that function is still restricted to staff in the regular forums!