I’m an occasional participant in a game thread on another board that started nine years ago and has been posted to regularly ever since. Are there examples of longer-running threads than that? I suppose there are zombie threads that get resurrected years later, but this one has been near the top of the first page of the forum for most if its life. And perhaps there are things like IMDB or Amazon comments pages that go back years, but I wouldn’t really call them threads.
Is it a discussion about when Duke Nukem Forever is going to be released?
I think there’s a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special thread around here that gets re-opened annually and has been going for at least 8 years, possibly 9.
WAG: It’s probably on The WELL. The WELL has been running since 1985, and its rather archaic organization basically looks like a message board where never-ending threads are to be opened and added to until doomsday (called “topics”). At one time back in the old days, they resisted streamlining their interface precisely because they wanted the interaction to force people to read before commenting.