I'm not an expert of SMF, but I swear I saw an option that I can set here that expires a thread after a certain number of days, so yeah, we can prevent replies to really old threads.There's nothing stopping anyone from linking to old threads, you can just copy the permalink url to an old post in a new message and say something like "I see in this thread that Woz said Blueboxes were really cool."
We'll have to see once I start to import these guys what as to what happens. One of my (few?) better decisions was to setup all of this in a bunch of docker containers, so I can experiment on a simulacrum of the forum on my laptop, so once I'm ready to import I'll see what happens. I hope I can set the date on the posts to the same date as the original message. If it sets it to the date of the import, that would suck. (And if it doesn't work right, I can trash the container and try again without messing up the live forum.)
Also apologies for taking it slow on this. I was sick with the martian death flu most of last week, so didn't get anywhere near what I wanted to achieve.
I did extract all the email addresses and looked over the mailbox, and it's quite the mess. I see a bunch of users on the old initial LisaList that re-signed up and posted with multiple accounts. So I'd need to manually find and replace the duplicates so that posts from the same user show up as from the same account and not from 3 or 4 different ones.
This will need edits to the mailbox file too. (i.e. some folks had either their own domain, or emails with their ISPs, then changed ISPs, and then then switched yet again to another, so 3-4 accounts over 19 years.) And there's a lot of craziness over UTF8 stuff.
So while I can do it the cheap and quick way, I think that's a bad idea. I think this needs to be done right because otherwise we won't be able to undo it without having to write SQL statements.