MN - What to do with zombie threads?

For how long do you intend to keep them though, Bertie? 2020, 2040 - ad infinitum? I wonder how many ASs are actually carried out each day by people who genuinely want to reference a useful old thread and not just to check whether a poster has any significant posting history before referring to MNHQ? Besides which, there's Classics which might be made more of.

People seem to have this instinctive resistance to disposing of information that doesn't 'appear' to be difficult to do. Almost on a 'You never know' basis.

The Cloud has actually done a disservice in my view. Managing teams no longer feel the pressing need to dispose of data or enforce data discipline and don't seem to notice the implications for actually processing the stuff that's sitting on some remote server.

They don't want to lock them because occasionally it's useful to have an old thread revived. And the problem with only allowing the OP to update is that sometimes a poster needs to re-register. New email, forgotten password, etc.

It would also be a massive job to go back and search through all old threads and see which ones are trash and which are worth keeping, so it's not possible to only delete old rubbish threads. Google searches are a huge source of traffic to the site - MN are not going to delete old threads. I wouldn't want them too either as old threads are very useful to search through when you want to find information.

Zombie warning should be permanent though, not only for the first couple of posts. IMHO :)

I wonder why they can't be culled as well - I think of the thousands upon thousands of trash threads that are there for posterity... what's the point in keeping them?

AIBU currently has 3701 pages of threads. At - say - 50 threads par page that's what - 185 thousand threads on AIBU alone?** And that's just AIBU.

I'd also like to know why threads can't be locked after a suitable period of time. Is this is a technical limitation? The time taken to respond to a report of a zombie thread often means the damage is done before anyone from MNHQ gets to it, and half a dozen people or more have started replying to a thread not realising it's from 2006.

But why aren't they capable of locking, Katherine? Surely it would prevent deliberate circumvention of the zombie status by those who wanted to do so for whatever reason? (I'd actually rather old threads were simply culled unless put on Classics - but that's another thread, I guess.)