reasonable time for online forum thread?

Depends on the content of said thread.
Some topics can be outdated in weeks, but keeping them around can be keeping keywords in the system for search engines to find and help keep your placement up.

Thanks Busy, I appreciate it. Your points are well taken.
It's not a very active Forum and my thinking for removing 2003 and earlier threads is so visitors may not think that the Forum is stale and stagnant since currently there is not a lot of activity.

thanks much,

rhs

Keep the ones with information or interesting posts and remove the unviewed ones.
Depending on the topics most things are often repeated (updated) over time, so can safey remove the older versions.

It's tough, remove the old content - forum looks dead, leave the old content - forum looks stale ... again depending on the topics, I'd rather see old content than no content

I've never personally liked removing old content. A policy my friend implemented on his board that I much prefered was that topics were automatically locked after 30 days of no replies. This prevented "thread necromancy" but allowed new members to read the old threads.

I too like to keep all of the threads on my site (as long as there not spam etc) I suppose that if you have threads which are relevent to 2003 and not know they would be good to delete and if the thread was a couple of your members talking to each other off topic and they have now left you could delete those as well.