I’m gonna jump on this just to echo my agreement that this is a bit out of left field, not to mention this code or w/e it is that seems to not function entirely as specified in OP.
This thread closes in “a day” even though the most recent post is… uh… an hour ago, as of writing this. So the locking seems to occur after OP, not inactivity. Plus it’s a “design” thread which, according to the OP here, shouldn’t even lock until 30 days from now, much less in a single one. Not to mention the question of “what happens when a category is changed?” that Snek raised above.
I’m gonna echo Vilk’s point that “bump” and “necro” haven’t appeared in the official forum rules or TOS anywhere. I’ve checked numerous times when I’VE gotten annoyed with random necros. But that brings up a point… Nine times out of ten, what harm is done by a necro aside from being annoying and sometimes making someone look like an idiot? Clutters up the forum? Maybe we should use something that has actual organization on the homescreen beyond “most recent post,” though I know the intention with FEU from the start was the equal viewership for everything to begin with.
This isn’t even going to MENTION the fact that this just kinda… happened. I’m choosing to trust that it was discussed internally by at least a FEW moderators. I don’t mean to go so far as to say the entire community should have a say, though. While we’re hardly large enough to warrant some things, we’re hardly small enough that every voice should be taken into account. Either way, the vision for how a community should look in terms of relatively harmless things like this should be an idea of the community largely as a whole. A simple poll could have read popularity on this. The fact that numerous people who have historically disagreed with each other on most things are agreeing that this takes it a bit far. Necros on toxic threads are more an issue with the thread, not the necro.
In summary: Is this to actually improve the community (both the face and the experience), or to make things less annoying for certain individuals particularly irked by necros? Trust me, I don’t like pointless necros. They annoy tf out of me. But I hardly think a minor annoyance warrants forcing people to DM mods to open threads and deal with random thread locks, particularly when numerous mods are largely inactive or don’t really seem to focus on the moderation side of their job.