[exdee]

A rational human being should notice that necrothreads aren't caused by someone not seeing the date on the thread, any more than shooting deaths are caused by holes in people. It's caused by the last date on the thread not being obvious.

Solutions off the top of my head:

* implement a thread locking delay
- thread is locked, say, 4 weeks after the last post

* make older dates more obvious
- categorize search results by how recently they've been updated
- categorize search results by relevance, but anything older than, say, 4 weeks gets visually differentiated or just put in a different results section half-way down the page.

All this still wouldn't have necessarily prevented this necro, because the user may have realized that it was an old thread, but not understood why the attachments were missing.

Solutions off the top of my head:

* When attachments are removed, replace them with a note saying "attachment removed to free up disk space for new attachments".

* When attachments are removed, symlink the old file to an image that says the same thing as the previous solution. The symlink allows one image to be used for every case when an attachment needs to be removed.


...or we could continue ignoring the fact that no one cares about solving the problem and we're actually entertaining ourselves by making fun of users who cause necrothreads.