By the way, I don't know that I would encourage this, but you can drag a long-passed thread back into Recently Active Threads by posting another followup to it...

You can also view a long past thread by using the temporal navigation links at the top (the arrows) or by using something like [href://?node_id=397425;for_nodes=479965|this] which produces this, of course this wont bring it to anyone elses attention, but it might be a neat hack for peoples Free Nodelet