At risk of further divergence, I have seen some vBulletin forums which have set an option that pops up a confirmation dialog box asking the user if they REALLY want to post on the thread, since it has been dormant for so many months. I'm not a vBulletin expert, but I would think and hope that this option exists here, perhaps that would be useful. At least that way it doesn't happen accidentally (which can happen if someone is using a search feature to look for threads on certain topics, which they may not notice has an older date.)
Just a thought.
TFred