After reading some comments and posting to a month-old thread on another blog, I got to thinking (for the nth time) about the practise of "necroposting." This is posting to old threads, where the definition of "old" varies. I've seen it as long as a couple of weeks, but generally it's a week - singular - or even days. I've seen ridicule heaped upon the heads of those who dare to respond to a thread that's been dead for a week, and I've personally been asked why I thought responding to a 3 month old post was appropriate.
I can understand why some bloggers close comments on old posts - I get a lot of emails as a result of spammers trying to post to a couple of my old posts in particular. I don't appreciate it though, and I tend not to comment at all on sites that have such a policy. (In fact, I tend to avoid them altogether.)
I believe that the rationale behind criticizing necroposting goes something like this: "that discussion was already had and it's over with." Follow-ons may be of the form "beating a dead horse" or "we're no longer interested." While that has some merit on topics that are only of interest in a particular time period - say, current events, or 'what should Kevin Lowe do this summer' (obviously that's no longer interesting if we're talking 2006, he's done it already), I don't feel that it ought to extend beyond that.
If a given subject is interesting enough to discuss in the first place, it ought to be interesting enough to continue discussion. The notion that one only "gets" a few days or a week in which to formulate one's thoughts, then to post and debate them, is most charitably described as naive and misguided. (I would go so far as to use the word "stupid" in most applications of the term.)
Needless to say, I deliberately keep comments open on all posts here, and will for the foreseeable future, because I would like to think that by and large, the things I write are not rooted temporally. Obviously discussions about Game 5 of the 2006 Stanley Cup Finals are unlikely to be of any interest at all, but I've seen it happen on other weblogs where people raise interesting points beyond what is directly applicable to the original topic. I suppose at that point it ought to be worthy of another post, but that line is not always easy to judge. I do not subscribe to the view that topics can be eternally closed, and do not like discussing things with people who do.