Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

I'd like to relate a recent mishap of mine on Newgrounds in an attempt both to help forum moderators and prevent other users like me from running afoul of mods without intending to.

Just yesterday I punched up "Ganon" (as in the angry-blue-pig form of Link's chief adversary in the Legend of Zelda series) under a search for BBS topics, just for the heck of it. I found one telling NG users to go to www.gamefaqs.com and vote for Ganon in a Ganon v. Magus poll. I made some comment about how I wouldn't vote for any villain until somebody named a foe who could beat the one my bet is always on (hint: he wields a great over-long katana and has glowing aqua-green eyes) in a villains' fight.
Little did I realize (as I hadn't been looking at dates and times on people's posts) that the last post was in 2003, and for bumping the thread, I've been banned from the BBS for 3 days for "bumping a 5-year-old spam thread" according to the moderator who nailed me.

In light of this, I'd like to first apologize for not paying better attention. Second, I'd like to suggest to the mods and administrators a way of preventing other NG users from meeting the same pitfall that I did. My suggestion is this: implement a system that automatically deletes non-locked stale topics to which nobody has responded after a given period of time (I consider a reasonable length of time to be 2 years given that the one I bumped was 5 years old, but I'm okay leaving it up to the admins). However, it may not be a good idea to disclose an auto-delete time in the BBS Rules, as spammers may become more active in their thread-bumping if they know when threads will be deleted, an act that falls under the category of "attempting to smartass one's way around the rules."

I anticipate that moderators who read this news post will also become more vigilant about locking and/or deleting topics that, in their opinions, fall under the "spam thread" category and banning perpetrators of spam threads.