Yes, it has been said before … but I think it needs to be said once again.
In my opinion, it should no longer be possible to “reply to” any thread that is more than (say …) one year old on this site. Whether the instigator is a “bot” or an actual human. It should be necessary to create a brand-new thread – with or without reference to the old one.
My simple argument for this is that “the technology that we are all discussing is changing at light-speed.” Therefore, threads that are older are now quite-literally “technically meaningless.” The site’s hard-working moderators should not have to waste time every day dealing with a situation that the site software could dispose-of with a very simple rule.
If you really do want to refer to an old thread, you can very simply include a hyperlink to it in the opening page of your new discussion.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are protected from now-irrelevant “zombies.”
Why? Is it hurting anything or just annoying a small group of people?
One of the beauties of a forum like this is that one can continue a discussion when new questions arise about the same/initial technical issues in Blender.
Actually, that kind of continuation isn’t ideal. Discourse tracks solutions to problems, which is both reflected in topic status and helps increase user standing of whomever solved the topic. There can be only one solution per topic. To not undermine that system it’s best to stick to one topic per problem, even if it’s a “me too” (especially since quite often a problem that’s perceived as the same by original poster is in fact different). And for that reason it may indeed be helpful to auto-close support topics after a certain amount of time (although a year is probably too much).
Outside of support though, I don’t think there can be any universal rule. If someone decides to comment on a two-year-old artwork (thus potentially exposing it for other users who missed it), or update their sketchbook after a hiatus, or continue talking about whatever in Off-Topic Chat - so long as discussion stays relevant, I can’t see why that should require starting a new topic.
My thought is simply: "Refer to it, sure." But a “zombie” thread might refer to technology and methods which no longer exist in the product. It happens quite a bit. Far better, I think, to create a new thread that, if need be, includes a URL-link to the original thread in its opening post. A seven-year-old necrotic thread that discusses “Blender Internal” ought to remain underground.
I still often use resources from 2010 or earlier. There are even old bpy topics which can still be used (to not talk about bge resources which i often use too). There are old addons too which are great and not updated to 2.8+
To be fair, some folks are using older version of blender and might need help related to how things were back then. Replying to an old topic might cause some of the same people who were discussing that issue back then to see that someone needs help with something they may have found a solution for a long time ago.
This is a topic that’s come up a few times since we migrated to Discourse. On the older forum software, we did actually have an autolock after one year of thread inactivity. It only seemed to bother people occasionally. When we were asked about autolocking after the migration, I don’t think that feature was supported by Discourse at the time. Is it supported now?
The problem here is that the list of Suggested Topics at the bottom of each thread doesn’t care how old a thread is or how inactive it’s been. This has occasionally caused people to unwittingly read and respond to threads that are quite old.
Personally, if the response to a thread is useful or relevant, I don’t particularly care if the thread is resurrected after years of being idle. The general disdain for necroposting never made a lot of sense to me. That said, old threads are also a haven for spammers and bots to squeeze out SEO juice.
The argument for autolocking seems to be that these threads are somehow taxing the moderation team. I don’t see that happening. The moderation tools that Discourse provides makes managing old threads pretty painless. It’s more likely that seeing these old threads is mildly annoying to a handful of users. It may be nice if the Suggested Topics list were more relevant, but at this time, I don’t feel autolocking is necessary.
So, if someone has a problem and asks a question, but it takes too late, I can’t reply to that thread even when the thread might be the first result on Google?
Does Discourse provide a user-set filter for date cut-off for the Suggested Topics like the Advanced Search function?
Is it possible to merely change the CSS color of the Suggested Topics’ Activity column to the same black/white as its thread’s title to make it more prominent? As it stands the gray is easily ignorable.
I’d personally prefer to not locking old threads: I understand some feel that old threads are less signal-to-noise but I see it as any information is better than locked information…but what do I know?
Also in suggested topics should not be more than 1 year old, except for if you have read everything and there wouldn’t be anything left to suggest (somehow that’s Discourse logic I believe)
Oooh… either I was ill-informed or I’m just behind the times in terms of the updates the Discourse team has been doing. Those are both really helpful features.
The per category thing is a tad annoying though. Kind of encourages us to look more closely at consolidating categories, doesn’t it?
Maybe it’s the unwanted influence of “bots,” but we continue to see that threads from an entirely-unreasonable “time ago” continue to be regularly re-opened. I therefore (re-)cast yet another vote for the idea that, after a certain period of time, all threads should become “locked.” You can refer to any such thread in any future post, but you cannot add to the existing one. I argue that this policy would be a significant advancement for the site, especially considering the “automatic pest-influences.” All threads beyond a (fairly recent) cutoff date should be categorically locked, while other threads should become locked after a reasonable amount of inactivity – subject to moderator discretion.
I of course invite all comments. (But am unlikely to further reply to them.)
To my knowledge, locking threads does not prevent bumping of threads. Users can still delete posts of their own (or others if their a moderator) even if their post lies within a locked thread. Necro bumping happens whenever a last post of a thread; or in some cases, the initial thread post, is modified e.g. edited post, edited tags, thread migration or even post deletion as is more commonly seen with necro bumping.
I absolutely dislike the idea to lock threads after a certain time. On other forums that do this, I find this behaviour really really really annoying.
Especially when you want to take part of the previous discussion to add tips, advices, informative comments, etc… This is so frustrating not being able to continue a discussion on the same topic.
Also, by replying in the same (old) thread, there’s a chance that the other forum members (who participated to that thread earlier) track or watch the thread for new replies.
If one day we are obliged to create new threads for the same topic (to continue the discussion), it will make people -who track the previous thread- not necessary know about new comments posted in the new thread. It could probably lower the interaction between forum members: those who were interested by the initial thread would not be notified of new replies in the new thread.
Let’s imagine that threads are locked after 6 months or 1 year. For example a thread about an add-on that has been temporary abandoned by its author. I can’t imagine BA admins/moderators (nor add-on developers themselves) enjoy people opening new threads about the same add-on. This would split the discussion in several threads…
Atm, it is convenient to be able to scroll up a long thread to see if someone else had the same issue or reported the same bug, etc. With split threads, this would become impossible. One would have to open several tabs (with related threads) to follow the continuity of the discussion…
Also, with split threads, it could probably require moderators to merge threads… (rarely I admit but IMO, that’s a useless task to add on their shoulders).
Why does threads that are 2, 4 or 7 years old annoy you? If the discussion still goes on about the same topic, I don’t see anything bad about it, as long as it is still relevant to the original topic.
Also, to some extent, if everyone creates different threads about the same topics, browsing search results will become a pain to find the information between all the results.
That being said, I totally agree with @Stan_Pancakes 's comment about support threads. Those can be closed. But please, not others.
May I request @moderators to merge this thread into the OP’s previous thread?
To not spread the discussion across several threads… TYIA.
While I respect your opinion, I strongly disagree. I find it really annoying when other forums lock threads for no reason other than age, and don’t see how it improves the site. Especially if they’re shut down after a fairly recent cutoff date - a lot of large projects and addons may go quiet for extended lengths of time, and forcing the creation of new threads when they continue will just make the conversations more convoluted.
If someone has something meaningful to add to the conversation, even after x amount of time, I just don’t see how that harms anyone. And I guess I don’t really see how it’s different than posting when the topic is new. I don’t see how a new thread is more “valuable” than an old one.
Besides, bots can do their bot thing on any thread, or even start new ones so I don’t see how shutting down future conversations on a thread will stop them from spamming the rest of the site.
I’m not looking forward to manually updating each category 
