This one, that is.
The last post is from 9/5/2008, then a post today from Spectre of Pithecanthropus locking the thread.
Is it safe to assume a spammer reanimated it, and that those posts are now gone?
Idle curiosity, because it looks so strange.
Yeah, there was a spam post in there earlier. I saw it but I guess it got deleted.
Yes, that’s exactly what happened. If Specs hadn’t posted, it would have sunk back down into the murky basement of old threads, whether he had locked it or not. By posting, he brought it up to the current page.
Maybe when mods close zombie spam they should make a note of that reason in their closing announcement rather than just saying they’re closing it without giving the reason. Sure, long time people can usually figure it out, but it only takes a few seconds to type out “spammer bumped old thread, spam deleted, topic locked”.
Just out of curiosity, why bother locking it? If somebody had legitimately bumped the thread with new info, it wouldn’t have warranted a lock.
This is no doubt true. It’s not what we usually do.
I’ve closed them myself a time or two when they were repeatedly resurrected by spammers. (Really persistent spambot, I guess, took a while to kill.) Usually these days we just remove the spam and keep on going.