I'm just wondering how OLO decides which articles to archive and when. I am not as frequent a poster as I once was due to certain constraints and went to comment on a piece from Ian Plimer which was less than a month old.
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=17274

However it was archived thus not able to be commented on. There were other articles which were notably older which are still open.

Is it automatic and based on the last comment or is it an editorial decision?

Hi. Archiving occurs on the basis of activity which is determined by an algorithm. It is only the comments that are turned-off, and it is a function of when the last comment was made.

There are a number of reasons for this. One is that spammers were selecting old discussion threads to put spam on. The other was that people who wanted to defame someone else would sometimes come back to threads and leave a defamatory comment well after everyone else had left.

As we don't have resources to moderate every comment that goes up before it is posted, we needed a way of policing these almost vacant parts of discussion to ensure that nothing that broke the rules went up. The lack of discussion seemed the best metric to use.

Thanks Graham,

Thought it would be useful to have that explained to all.

Cheers