^well, most of the reasons that people do lock threads here is either:
1) Things are getting out of hand and people start being rude to each other, so somebody has to break it up. This is not a "flame war" forum, we want to keep this a peacefull community
2) Things get posted twice, in different sections and it's hard to keep track of two topics about the same thing, so admins lock the weakest one and redirect users to the more larger topic. This is done to keep things from getting confusing.
3) Because, as you said earlier, we now have to relly on outside sources ourselves, and if we keep mentioning them in the forums (which anti-piracy groups do check, as we can see) then we will run out of resources fast, so we tend to lock them in order to shut people up. Most people understand this, but there are also stupid people that are either too lazy (or inconsiderate) to read the rest of the thread, and they mention the source again !!! That way, the only measure that would shut them up would be to close the thread.
I for once agree with you on locking 2 year-old re-posts, because I myself am new to the forum and I don't know much about what was posted from the beginning, and I certainly have more important stuff to do than read archived threads that heppened way before the context of me being on this webspage, although sometimes I do read them, but only when I have time to.
Thread lock are there for a reason, and I'm actually glad you brought this up, nobody here is a dictator or trying to control everything (except for ren - just joking, ren buddy
) and thus they are only locking the thread, not deleting it, not banning or suspending anybody and people can always make a new thread to redeem themselves and ask pardon for re-posting (because it's the polite thing to do). I, for once, like it when our members say at the end of posting some new information something like "sorry if this is a repost" especially if they don't read the forums that often or watch it completely.
And nobody is mad at nobody for doing a repost, it happens, we move on, and our members should understand that it's for the best of the forums.
Thanks for your attention.
.
You beat me to it, lol.