When a thread is automatically archived and renewed, it appears that 'My Sticky' for that thread is also updated to point to the renewed thread. Unfortunately this has a side effect of throwing off the "Last Unread" bookmark and puts it into the middle of the renewed thread. Is this intentional? The end result is that it makes people miss the last day or two's worth of posts.

Using the Target Deals forum as an example, with the aggressive archiving it seems to be stuck in a cycle of:

1) reaching the archive post count
2) automatically renewed with viewer's last unread bookmarks moved into the middle of the renewed thread
3) questions/answers from the past few days (which are now in the archived thread) are missed and thus repeated, which grows the thread faster to the point where it starts over again at #1.

If I remember correctly, then a thread was manually retired, "My Sticky" continued to point to the retired thread so the 'Last unread' bookmark was not lost. Is there a way to give users the option of making automatically archived threads behave this way as well?

We are still tweaking the post count at which threads are autoclosed/retired/renewed, collecting statistics to see what works and what doesn't work for certain threads.

The Last Unread issue is interesting - we'll check on that, but it should be taking you to the first unread post in the "new" thread (i.e. not the "Retired" one) - that is by design.

We left the continuing (open) thread the same, for the purpose of preserving personal stickies and subscriptions.

We also left the remaining post count at 50, so that most of the threads are largely preserved in their discussion - although it's possible some of the extremely active threads will have 50+ posts in a matter of hours, rather than days.

At this point we do not have an option of pointing the sticky to the retired thread, for reasons provided above, but we'll see what else can be done to make automatic retiring/renewal less painful.

Thanks for the excellent reply. Is there any additional information you need if I see the 'last unread' mark placed anywhere other than the first unread post in the new thread?

Sure, if you can - provide the link the "Last Unread" icon takes you to. You can send it via PM or post here :)

We raised the limit to 2,000 posts before thread is auto-retired. Let's see if this works better.