OFF TOPIC
"This thread, now abused by spammers, should be closed." - gtc
Spammers?
I do hope the plural is just a slipped key! Calling me a spammer or inferring anything of the kind is enough to turn me into a puffy green sulk! "Hijacker" I can just about live with, but prefer "benign hijacker" LOL ;-) But call me a spammer and I reach foe me cutlas and swing me hook an me theremin parrot on me showlder stars te squaak..
But it does bring up an interesting question - your "My question was answered long ago" implies that this thread no longer has a purpose, and is therefore open to 'abuse' by spammers and hijackers, and should be closed.
The thing is though, that there are probably many hundreds of such "unclosed" threads, any one of which could be resurrected by persons who have a genuine posting to make on the same or similar matter, and use a dormant thread rather than creating a new one -
And locking / closing threads isnt going to prevent spammers - unless the core problem of member verification is solved and/or new members must go through a pre-moderation process for their first posts, these spammers will just create new threads.
Should all threads that have not been active for a period of time be automatically closed and archived? This would limit the available "store" of threads that could be abused - but I dont think any useful function would be served by this. I use the "recent posts" function, so all new postings are what appear when I log in - If a spammer has been at work, the screen is full of their threads, sometimes pushing a thread I am interested in off the screen... This is my major "issue" with forum spam - and locking threads will do nothing to solve that!
Finally - threads like this (where the "question was answered") can be fun! Dewster and Christopher's postings above were entertaining - I would never have spotted the hilarious word sequences Dewster did, had he not extracted them, as I have never bothered to read span generator output - I have now started to do this (it could become addictive! ;-)
The only "problem" with hijack of a "dormant" thread is probably that people will read a posting not realizing it is "off topic" - If all benign hijackers got into the habit of declaring a post "Off Topic", then this minor "problem" goes away.
Fred.