Locking Of Inactive Forum Threads

[Jimmy Dread]

Given the sudden re-emergence of (in some cases ancient) threads in the Music forum and the fact that one particular user's decision to comment on such a vast amount of them in such a short period of time has meant some more recent and relevant conversations have disappeared into the murky depths can I make a suggestion that once a thread is inactive for a fixed time period (say, 12-18 months) it is permanently locked unless a mod decides to re-open it.

I realise this has been discussed before but the irony of rebooting that thread to bring the subject up again was just far too silly.
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[RockyRaccoon]

I think this could be a good idea. We'd have to agree upon a time frame of inactivity (honestly I'd be good with 12 months).

Only foreseeable problem, I think, is the practicality of initially locking every single thread older than a year. That'd be a lot of work unless albummaster knows a special computery way of doing it in one fell swoop?
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[Romanelli]

I also seem to recall that there was a rash of users telling others that instead of blindly starting new threads, they should search the forums first and use older threads with discussions already intact.

I'm also seeing that while some more recent discussions are being pushed down (how many of those are there really?), some of the older stuff being brought to the top is turning into current discussions. People are responding.


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[albummaster]

Threads on BEA are currently auto-locked after 550 days which was discussed a while back as an appropriate length of time for a thread to be active. I think the issue here is that the forums have been fairly quiet recently, but on most forums you can expect the number of threads to change on a much more frequent basis than they are here. Personally, I don't think there's anything overly wrong, it's not as if the posts are spammy and busier forums are much more interesting for everybody, and are already helping to engage more people.

(EDIT: Fixed an issue where threads containing polls were excluded from auto-locking.)

[badseed]

I found myself agreeing with the initial post until I read Romanelli's comment and it made a lot of sense too. Like yeah it's weird when old dead threads come back to life, but would we rather have a second thread on the same topic? Hard to say, but if we want new users to feel welcome (and I understand not everyone does, especially when 95% of the people that do join [myself included] don't really have anything unique to bring to the table at this point, at least in the eyes of those that have an internet PhD in music and only want to have deep discussions about musical theory, time signatures, and Indie Emo J-Pop Rock) perhaps there should be a sticky post that explains some kind of guidelines. And who's to say what those guidelines actually are? Weird mixed feelings on this.