I spotted a thread earlier this month where the previous post was over a decade ago - that just looked silly IMO. I can appreciate not wanting to put people off quieter forums, but I would prefer closure to allowing revivals indefinitely.

Perhaps this is more appropriate in HUMTAB

I find many posters will do *anything* to avoid starting a new topic. They'll post on a topic which has nothing to do with their question. And then there are advertisers.

Perhaps quiet forums should be closed, and combined with more active forums.

Forum posts are usually stored as data on servers for a long period of time, even if a forum thread is dormant or closed, or a user's account is closed, for various reasons.

Companies use forums for customer service issues, brand promotion, displaying major insights of their business, getting feedback from users, initiating discussions, and in many other business related matters. User generated content in the form of reviews, photos, videos, forum posts, social media posts is used for the search engine optimization.

So, these dormant forum threads can be still useful, and may get revived unexpectedly, some day.

The OP said close, not delete.

I completely agree and have been asking for this for years. Somehow newbs are finding old threads and reviving them, then other well meaning people see it at the top of the forum and jump in, and on it goes.

Close threads after 1 year of inactivity.

Ss has been said TA is mostly on top of this and as RT said close dormant threads after 12 months of inactivity

In my view those that are brought back to life are because on some forums newer users are constantly told to use the search facility. The other reason is that some users just do it for the hell of it to annoy other users which is all very sad

If a post is inactive for a period of one year, it should be closed to new comments, period lMO (and many years of TA Forum experience)

Not Deleted, closed to comments

Many of the Beyond destination Theme forums where they are not closing these very old threads are open game for the Spammets and scammers and one guy operations/Tour guides/AI and Travel agents who love to advertise their tour companies etc. on Theme forums ...

Making these threads inaccessible by closing them to new comments, would help alleviate that problem

If its made difficult, they'd stop doing it for the most part

It would be good to close threads after 12 months and to do that consistently across all forums. We would all know where we are then. At the moment it's messy. But then, this is TA after all!

Note that threads in the busier forums are closed 12 months after the last post. So if the OP is dated April 1st and runs until November 28th, it will stay open until November 28th the following year. If a new post is added on Nov 15th, there is another year on the life of the thread until Nov 15th the following year.

Another thread revived after more than 10 years. Please TA close such threads

https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowTopic-g186358-i3138-k6959704-Sheepskin_store_underneath_Tolsey_Museum-Burford_Cotswolds_England.html

(I do realise I have revived this thread,,)