Expiration date on threads?

[Lochton]

I feel like after at least 5 years threads should auto close.......

Brought up a great idea.

Is it possible or functional to have an expiration date on threads that reach a certain age? I mean, we are directed at times with the answer of, 'instead of necroing an old topic, remake it'.

[Twdft]

I don't think this forum software got any update in about 5 or 10 years. Hold together by spit and scotch tape.

[Tziva]

This is suggested all the time but the answer remains the same: old threads are perfectly fine if they are still relevant and there is no reason to close them just because they hit some arbitrary time threshold. Not only do we have lots and lots of active threads that are years old (including many popular megathreads), we get very few actual necros anyway. It's better to handle them on a case by case basis than automate something just because we might get one necro a month or whatever.

Even if we did something where it only autoclosed threads that hadn't been active in X years, this would require custom forum modification and dev time which simply isn't worth it for such a low priority issue that rarely causes problems to begin with.

I don't think this forum software got any update in about 5 or 10 years. Hold together by spit and scotch tape.

This forum has a huge volume of custom modifications made to it (security, news support, the moderation system, special features, etc), which is partially why (on paper) we're still using "old" software.