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It's not a huge deal now ... only the occasional necroposting ... but as the ebook community grows, and as the user demographic shifts from early adopters to, um, less technically clueful people, it's only going to get worse. Topic drift is a problem on any forum (look at this discussion!), and a worse problem than most people realize because it prevents the right members from connecting with the right topics, which degrades the utility of the forum. This mutant sort of necroposting, where there's little if any connection between the original topic and the new post, is kind of a case of pre-drifted topics, which isn't good at all.
And this isn't something I see much if any of elsewhere. So there has to be a reason why MR in particular is a hotspot of this sort of thing. The only reason that I've been able to come up with that makes any kind of sense is that due to MR's prominence in search results, a much larger percentage of new users arrive via a hit on a post in a thread than via the main portal, and of course since only a small percentage of the threads are active, this means that if some percentage of those new arrivals just stick their question on the thread they landed on, the odds are it's an old thread.
Auto-locking old threads would probably be a good idea. True, old threads can sometimes become relevant again, but if that happens, the first poster can just link to the original thread for people to read before continuing the discussion. Limiting posting in inactive threads to people who aren't quite so new would solve both problems, but at the expense, I suspect, of far too much work; just locking the old ones would probably be sufficient. At the very least, more intrusive newbie orientation info, and a more obvious and educational warning on old threads, would probably help.
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