For the purposes of this suggestion, the following:
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A troll-bump is a thread that is very old, and has been inactive for a significant length of time, but which a troll has posted to, simply to bring it to the top and annoy people.
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The benefit of making troll-bumps easier to spot is that interested board browsers, in recognizing a troll-bump, can ignore it.
2a. A side benefit is that it would make a troll easier to spot.
The suggestion is this: Expand the thread starter field in the table of contents so that in addition to displaying the author of the OP, it also displays the date the thread was begun.
If this is technically feasible, it should at the very least remove one of the weapons from the troll arsenal.
An objection might be that it would make it difficult for a poster to revive a thread legitimately. My response is that if a non-trolling poster wishes to revive a thread’s subject matter legitimately, this can be done easily enough by starting a new thread, and posting a link, just as one can revisit the subject of an archived thread by posting a link to it.
Once again, this is all dependent on the technical feasibility of the operation. If it would require somebody going back through all of the threads and entering the data into this field by hand, I withdraw the suggestion. After all I’m not ready to volunteer for such a chore, and I don’t think it would be seemly of me to request that anybody else do so, either.