Is there any chance that you can prevent people from posting in posts that are old, maybe auto prune them if they are older than a month with no new posts. Once one member posts in it, a whole bunch of members post in them ignoring the date, and just look at the topic. Same thing with when offers close in B/S/T how they still offer services just to advertise themselves especially if they don't have the 25 posts or the 2 weeks.
Yes, there's no one solution that solves all situations. Some should stay open indeed. So since there's no solution, we leave it up to good judgement on the members' part.
Alright, this is mainly for the B/S/T forums. I would have to disagree with you on the fact that if there is a thread that is say more than a month old or even say 3 months for this matter where there has been no activity (i'm not saying that the thread itself is a month old, i'm saying from the last post) 99.99% of the time, the thread creator has stopped looking for comments in that thread, and a simple PM would handle the situation a lot better.
True, so you do agree that there is no one solution for the entire forum. If you report a thread you started and ask for it to be closed because the sale is over we normally do that immediately.