Leave the tab open, perhaps?

Obviously not everyone always has their computer on or often move between work and home to read the forums.

Either way it doesn't bother me, it's just that I can see why it's still beneficial to break up threads sometimes.

Well I remember the "Lets make the longest thread" that Geoff did a long time ago (which I think got 20k posts before he locked it) and that certainly wasn't 2 years ago. I did some searching and you do appear to be right. Threads used to be locked at around 250 posts back in '04. Threads would often get to 600-800 posts though before a mod noticed. It does appear that the 800 limit was started in early '06.

I still think it's a completely stupid and arbitrary limit. So far fumanstan has been the only one to offer even the slimmest of reasons why threads should be locked for length.

Why can't we just try it and see if the forum goes to hell. It makes less work for you mods. IB certainly doesn't think it's an issue and who cares what rules Geoff established because he's not around anymore.

We knew that super huge threads would kill the forum many years ago. However we were experiencing performance issues late in '06 and Geoff told us to keep threads at 800 or fewer posts on 10-09-06. There was a 1000 post limit prior to that.

So I just glanced at the other forum I hang out at (with the giant threads), and it's running vBulletin 3.5.3. DVDTalk is on 3.7.2. They have numerous threads with 10,000+ posts in them and don't seem to be suffering. I think they had one or two threads break at the 85,000 mark or so, but I'd imagine it would take a while for any thread around here to get to that mark.

As Mordred has stated, I would like to give it a shot if at all possible.

Considering we had serious forum performance issues long after 10-09-06 I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it had little to nothing to do with threads being too long. However, feel free to continue the failed policies of the previous administration.