What's with all these old threads popping up today?

I think it has something to do with spam posts, which always appear on weekends, should you need a false passport or driver’s licence. The spam gets magically deleted by technology, and we are left with an ancient thread to which the spam was attached. That is my very sophisticated take on it.

If I click on recent posts it seems okay:
https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/all-topics
Sometimes when I click on somebody's posting history, I forget and end up down a rabbit hole of old posts. 😀

I suspect that someone either deleted their account or a bunch of their posts.

I was thinking someone in IT was cleaning out either a banned poster or spam posts. I noted that too...many where the last post was April.

Then, as always, others start posting without realizing the posts are months old and trips are done.

Yep, I think someone is deleting their old posts too. Been going on for a few days now.

I thought I was going doolally, or the moderators were all aligned in a conspiracy against me.

It's happened in the past on several occasions and usually gets cleared up in a day or so. I try to just ignore it. The non technical term for the cause is "GOK" -- which is short for God Only Knows".

Here is the response I got from RS when asked about it earlier in the week

It's because someone had the brilliant idea of manually deleting a bunch of their own posts. There’s not a whole lot I can do about it at the moment, but the forum system will sort itself out as people reply to other discussions. Sorry for the hassle in the mean time. Andrew Wakeling

Oddly it started shortly after the upgrade.... hmmm

I have seen this off and on since I started reading the messages here. But this time it is a much higher number than ever before.

Would be a nice enhancement next time they make changes:

Deleting a message posted does not flag the topic as needing to show it has new activity. Only posting new messages or updating a previous one will do that.

if it’s a problem they can eliminate deletes from being recognized as
new activity.

Methinks that's a pretty good idea if not a laborious change for the IT folks to make. ???

I think only whole new posts should be recognized as activity, not
deletes, not edits.

Except that some people actually want to see how threads they've participated in have progressed in their "My History" view. If edits or new replies (which are essentially edits to the thread) are not recognized at all, then the "last posting" date stamp next to each thread is meaningless (it will only show the date the thread was created). It's "all or nothing" - the software has to be a lot more sophisticated to distinguish between a minor, meaningless edit versus a substantive one (conceivably the IT folks can see the trigger anyway they want, including word count). I just hope that this system has adequate built-in rules to recognize when someone deletes themselves as a user completely and leaves the forum - if they've posted more than a small number of times (as in the hundreds or thousands), all those threads they contributed to would not suddenly reappear because they'll overwhelm the forum.

The fact that some folks keep commenting on threads where the trip has already been taken cannot be solved by the Webmaster - it's user error. That's part of the problem too, but relatively minor.