I usually click on the thread link shown in similar thread area and just figured it out that most of them are as old as 3 or 4 years, cant say what do we need to do with a 4 year old thread when looking to buy or sell something but its really annoying when you like the deal and rush to post cant the threads in the Similar Threads section be filtered by the date ?
I found it quite unhelpful too. When all the suggestions you get from similar threads feature are toooooo old to be any helpful. especially in BST section. are you hearing shawn?
Similar threads would probably be removed before making it new threads exclusively. Because new threads are calculated when a thread is created (which is why a thread will never have a related thread that was created after the current thread was created). Trying to calculate related threads on every thread view would just put unnecessary stress on the DB server. Ultimately such a change would need to come from vBulletin itself, but if they did something like make it do the similar threads every time you view a thread, I'd just turn it off. If you *really* want to find similar threads, just use the search function. It gives you more flexibility and lets you filter stuff by how YOU want.
of course newer threads are impossible to add at the time of creation and are very expensive to add at the time of view or reply. But I am concerned about them being too old. many times all the suggestions are like 4-6 years old. any old (especially closed) thread is completely irrelevent in BST section, and not very relevant in other sections too, because most discussions on this forum are time sensitive. Now what happens, a person who completely relies on the chronology of the forum, he is sure all threads he is offered to look into are arranged chronologically, he sometimes click and very old thread and do not bother to look at the dates, and gets totally confused with the discussions. My suggestion, you can completely disable this feature from certain sub-forums. you can also arrange the suggestions chronologically so only the newest 5 of them added to suggestions offered and not the best matching 5 (at the time of creation of thread)