The rule says if the order of two actions/events is clear then the past perfect is not necessary, i.e. you can use past simple. So if the sentence has before or after then the order is clear and therefore the rule applies. The site here says the first sentence is incorrect. Is he/she right? If so, how do you explain what appears, to me, to be contradictory?
If the Past Perfect is not referring to an action at a specific time, Past Perfect is not optional. Compare the examples below. Here Past Perfect is referring to a lack of experience rather than an action at a specific time. For this reason, Simple Past cannot be used.
Examples:
She never saw a bear before she moved to Alaska. Not Correct
She had never seen a bear before she moved to Alaska. Correct
They say "a lack of experience rather than an action". Saying that just does not solve the problem I have which is the past simple fits the rule of order of events. Not seeing is a negative event with the verb "to see".
I hope the answer won't be this is how we speak or this is how English works or since when languages are logical!
Answer
This "authority" is in error; the past perfect is not necessarily required here, although there are circumstances in which it would be preferred in formal discourse, and the simple past is not incorrect, although there are circumstances in which its use would be deprecated in formal discourse.
This is in the first instance a matter of context— specifically, what you are trying to express and what time you are talking about, what grammarians call Reference Time.
Perfect constructions do not express events prior to Reference Time; they express a state grounded in prior events which obtains at Reference Time. So if you are talking about a time in the past when your subject's previous unfamiliarity with bears was of immediate relevance, the past perfect will be appropriate:
As she was hiking in the Tongass National Forest she was suddenly confronted by a menacing dark creature her own height and twice her mass. She did not recognize it—she had never seen a bear before she moved to Alaska.
But if your Reference Time, the time you are speaking about, lies before the time at which she moved to Alaska, a past perfect will not be appropriate:
She was in her youth a keen student of wildlife—kangaroos, wallaby, emus—but she never visited zoos, which depressed her, so she never saw a bear before she moved to Alaska.
In less cut-and-dried circumstances, usage varies: formal usage and British colloquial usage tends to employ the past perfect more often than US colloqual usage. If you have an appetite for technical grammar, I modestly recommend our Canonical Post on Perfect Constructions, particularly sections 3.2 and 4. If not, the best 'rule of thumb' respecting use of the past perfect is FumbleFingers‘ Perfect Truism:
”Don’t use the perfect unless you need it.”
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