I've been noticing a lot of really really really old posts coming up from the dead and I suspect its the search feature and defaulting to relevance rather than post date. Seems like a lot of people dont bother to notice they're replying to a 6 7 or 8 year old post.

Default to sort by post date?

 

It isn't just relevance. It is a weighted average type, post age being part of that.

 

Ok, whatever you want to refer to it as. The dropdown says "Relevance"

 

I think I wasn't clear enough, Relevance isn't what you think it means. It isn't just how close the words match, it also takes into account the age of the post and other things, so sorting by post date would defeat the purpose of the more intelligent search system.

 

Amorget is right about the Relevance. There is a lot that contribute to the Relevance scale. Just because a thread/post is old, doesn't mean it isn't valuable or helpful to the members, right? Post date does not equal quality of information.

On the reply side, if this really is a "problem" (I'm not sure), it might be possible to look into adding some sort of brief warning to the user that they are about to reply to a thread X weeks/months/years old. It appears many of them do not notice the post date when they reply.