Warn if replying to old thread/lock after period of inactivity

[ByteMarks]

Probably been mentioned before, but something to warn a poster if the last post in a thread is old, e.g. 6 months, and/or possibly lock thread after a period of inactivity, e.g. 1 year.

[TMS]

Not sure I agree with this. Some people do piggyback (let's not so hijack). But some people just say thank you, and others offer new solutions.

There was a recent suggestion, I think from zbor but I could be wrong, to re-open old threads and apply new solutions. That could be replacing VBA or complex formulae with new (365) functionality. I think that would be interesting but, as yet, I haven't found a simple way to find suitable candidates for refreshing.

[AliGW]

I don't agree with this. We sometimes close threads whilst hijackers are dealt with, but I aim to reopen them once the hijacker has started their own thread.

They only have to look at the date stamp of the previous post ... Not too hard to do!!!

[6StringJazzer]

warn a poster if the last post in a thread is old

Not sure what problem you want to solve here. There are legitimate reasons to post in an older thread, and there are also hijacks and spam. In all cases, the poster is deliberately posting in an old thread, and would ignore such a warning.

lock thread after a period of inactivity, e.g. 1 year.

As mentioned above, there are legitimate reasons to post in an old thread, even one over a year old. There are also not-so-legitimate reasons, and in such cases we generally get a post report about it. At that time if it looks like the thread is very old, problem answered, and no further light to be shed, we'll close it.

There was a recent suggestion, I think from zbor but I could be wrong, to re-open old threads and apply new solutions. That could be replacing VBA or complex formulae with new (365) functionality. I think that would be interesting but, as yet, I haven't found a simple way to find suitable candidates for refreshing.

I haven't seen that suggestion. I can see value in it, but I also it as a rabbit hole, and such updates might not ever be seen by anybody.

I aim to reopen them once the hijacker has started their own thread.

That's laudable. For myself, I don't have the capacity to track the hijackers and re-open them if a new thread is started.

[ByteMarks]

Not really aiming to solve any real problem. I've noticed this sort of implementation on a few other platforms so thought I'd put this out there to see whether people here thought it would enhance the user experience if there was some warning that a thread was old when attempting to reply. Really to avoid those "do you realise this thread is 15 years old" type scenarios.

[6StringJazzer]

There might be value to it, but to be very open about it we have very limited tech support, they've been promising a migration to a new platform for months if not years, and that kind of change would require custom code to our current system, vBulletin. They do not have resources to do that. Additionally I do not have back-end experience with that system so I don't know if customizing it precludes you from accepting subsequent maintenance releases.

Unfortunately for all practical purposes we are limited to the kinds of changes that can be made the user Admin level.