A Growing Problem With The Random Discussion Page

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There is a growing problem with the above page in that it's slowly being hijacked by topics with thousands of replies, these include:

Name....................................................................Replies
The Clean Chatroom..............................................39413
Post Something That Made You Happy Today.......11277
Got Anything Random To Say................................74672
Post Something That Made You Unhappy Today..10220
The Greeting Thread..............................................15204
Interview The Person Below You...........................29847
What Song Are You Listening To Right Now?.......24995
I Confess................................................................16905
What Are u Doing Right Now..................................13999

Dots are included for table formatting.

The above are only a small sample of these running threads (those over 10,000 messages) yet they represent nearly a quarter of a million messages. Yes, I know that Wrong Planet is a useful resource but it's also a site with server problems.

So, how about setting up a site policy of deleting messages in long running threads that are over a year old?

That's not happened in ten years so it seems unlikely to start now.
In many cases implementing such a policy would remove the opening post which contains a description of the thread's purpose or rules, for games threads.
Also, static message storage is not a server loading issue.

I've started to wonder if maybe all the really long threads could be turned into stickies so that they don't crowd out the newer short threads.

It's the popularity of a thread, not its length, which keeps it at the top of the first index page so making a thread a sticky will only guarantee it remains at the top of the page and if too many are stickied, any new threads will be forced to appear at the bottom of the page - or maybe even on the second page.

By remaining unstickied, threads will eventually get pushed down the index page by newer, more popular threads.
Even some of the long-lived games threads have had their quiet periods and floated off onto the second or third index page.