Looking over the board rules I have noticed that there is no rule explicitly against resurrecting long dead posts, as evidenced by the resurrection of yet another Gimp vs Photoshop thread. This one just happens to be four years old. Frequently I have noticed these topics being resurrected by "iGuest"; I am unsure what exactly that means. Oft times threads get resurrected by new members coming in trying to earn early points fast.

I will admit this is very much a personal opinion but I think the practice is overall bad for the boards. Adding a comment to a dead topic may sometime illicit an additional comment or two but most often the thread simply dies once more. This is especially true if a member has already responded to the same post a year before. It seems that in most cases starting a new thread (even it is a re-hash) would be more likely to generate more conversation. In the instance of answering request for help about a technical issue chances are that if a question was asked six months prior to your response the original poster has either found a resolution, found a workaround, has stopped caring or, is now a skeleton slumped against the keyboard. This is especially true if a competent answer has already been given to the issue at hand. (In full disclosure I have answered an older question like this. In my defense it was in the database section and full resolution had not been given. Thus I made the disclaimer that the post was for the sake of reference) I also think that new post to really out dated questions just seems sloppy.

To my suggestion.

Perhaps a new rule identifying a time at which a topic is dead and therefore need not be responded to further.

or

Do a one time purge and close any thread older than a certain age.

or

Describe a rule that a new post made where the post previous to it is of a certain age the new post is of less value point wise.

Just a thought on my part to help keep Astahost a good forum and a great free web host. </buttkiss>

iGuest and Feedbacker are anonymous people. Imo, very stupid people.

Purging Topics and Posts by an arbitrary date is not a good idea. The Bots have searched and indexed them already and to simply remove them would affect how the search results are handled. Nothing worse than using Google to find "the perfect answer" only to be shown a "404 - page not found".

The SEO of Astahost and / or the Trap17 would be adversely affected by a purging, however, maybe an archiving system where the less visited pages are placed into could be a good idea.

I "mis-spoke" a tad. By purge I meant close not remove them altogether. Nearly every other board I know of has some sort of rule concerning the resurrection of old posts.

I guess the correct way would be to close that very old topics. However, this has to be done by a moderator, and our mods here are rather busy with a lot of other things.

That would certainly be a significant amount of work to manually close older threads. It would seem, however, than an admin could do it fairly easily either through whatever tool the BB program uses to manage itself or by executing a fairly basic SQL statement on the database.