I’m not sure whether this has ever been discussed or not (I did search, didn’t find anything).
It seems like there’s been a rash of old thread bumps lately. I was wondering about the feasibility/desirability of locking all threads some period of time after the last post (say, maybe 4 months). If there was a desire to reopen the thread you could either open a new thread and reference the old or request a mod to reopen.
Too much work for the mods? Bad idea in general? Wrong forum for this post? 
Trouble: lots.
Benefit: none.
Why would locking old threads be desireable? Seems like the correct forum for the question, though.
I can’t seem to find it, but in a recently revived thread, there was something about it increasing the load on the server. It may or may not have been true.
There’s apparently enough concern about old threads being reopened that it’s covered in the FAQ though:
I agree that there are good reasons to consider it, but I’d still be sad if my telemarketer thread wasn’t able to make its random twice-yearly appearance.
But what are these reasons? Does it make sense to use two threads for a single topic? It seems like the fewer threads, the better the server’s resources are used.
Example: Someone thinks they may have found a breakthrough in the field of echoing waterfowl quacks. They post this as a new topic/thread with the older thread linked. Now, others wishing to add to the discussion will need to open the older, linked thread, get up to speed on the latest in the quacking sciences before they can even begin to comprehend the new breakthrough. So two threads have been viewed by the reader.
And multiple threads make it easier to overlook or otherwise miss either the older or newer thread when searching. Right?
Well, there would have to be some exceptions! I mean, you just can’t go messing with the classics…
I just popped in to yell in case someone was proposing that old threads be deleted. (Yes, that idea gets floated around sometimes, damned if I know why it gets any traction).
Read-only is reasonable.
The reason lots of folks don’t like “zombie threads” rising anew is that folks miss the post date on the OP and jump in and start arguing with people who may be
• not active on SDMB in years
• banned
• dead
This upsets some people when they read it, disconcerts others in a milder fashion, and often annoys the starch out of newly replying people when they realize their carefully crafted response and/or research with links is addressing a 9 month or 3 year old issue or question. By the end of the day after someone puts a new post to an ancient thread, there will have been 5 subsequent replies, 3 of which are to the OP or one of the other ancient responses, and of the 2 which really are responses to the modern-day post that resurrected the thread, 1 will be a “Why for the luvva pete did you post to this ancient thread instead of starting a new one?”
(I myself am known by non-newbies here to be a culprit, but in fairness to myself my spate of resurrections occurred at a time when pruning older/inactive threads was indeed being proposed, so I was “rescuing them from the cutting floor”)
But unless the board s/w allows for automatic read-onliness to descend upon threads as they age past a certain point, it’s too much hassle. We’ve survived the attach of the undead zombie threads before and we’ll continue to survive them.
Ahh…thanks for pointing this out. I meant for that to be in the OP and missed it. I was assuming there would be some auto-lock feature. I agree that if there is not such a feature, what I suggest would be waaaaay too much trouble.