Whats the use of the "do not reply" advice header if it can be ignored anyway? This bumping also allows other users to down-vote replies since it now top post. But the main thing is why are users able to reply to these very old posts despite the header?

Edit;

[I have to append this edit to this post to make the question clearer, since @conquestor3's reply: Some people type very slow doesn't make any sense towards the post, so I am thinking maybe the post is not clear enough. [Edit2: Ok a joke, they started typing on the 58th day, but they are so slow, they only finished the post after the 60th day, hmm some people like me are also slow in getting jokes :(]]

The above clearly advices that users should not reply to post older 60 days, yet users continue to bump these kind of very old posts, Why? More so that this allows down voting of posts again all over. Down voting old posts on its own is not against the rules, but a very old post wrongly bumped shouldn't have happened in the first place anyway

Managing a community like this is always a balance, and there will always be poor etiquette, bad manners, and outright abuses -- if someone is really intent on harassing someone they disagree with, they'll just look up their recent posts and go down-vote them there -- its happened to me, and I've seen it happen a handful more times than that.

But overall, I think, the volume of necro'd threads must be quite low compared to new threads (certainly < 1%), and discounting the ones that are justifiably revived, the rate of problematic necros are even lower still. From that standpoint, I don't see much benefit, myself, to setting arbitrary limits on things that are generally not causing much pain in the grand scheme.

If I were to design a technical solution myself, though, I might "retire" threads that have been inactive for 2-4 weeks, and disable (down?) votes at that time. New posts would bring the thread out of retirement and restore voting. I'd have a second threshold at 4-8 weeks from first post (that goes into effect at the first inactivity threshold after that date) which would then imposes a cost to to the respondent's reputation -- say, 9-15 points; that combination would discourage people from necro'ing very old posts for inane or malicious reasons, but give a reasonable avenue to revive a thread where it makes sense to do so -- and importantly -- require them to add something new to the conversation to do so. The penalty should be high enough to discourage dickish behavior, but low enough that up-votes on their reply could negate/reverse the cost if the community finds their necromancy to be for a worthy cause.

Of course, that's not the kind of option that's likely built into the site software, and implementing those kinds of features costs time, money, and opportunity against other needs. And I don't think any response -- none of: no action, the warning, preventing necromancy, or what I've described -- is a clear winner all around.

Without knowing specifics about how the board software works, I would suspect a combination of (1) this would be a global enable/disable, but (2) there are certain classes of thread for which replying after 60 days is OK. An example of the latter might be threads in the Coding Horrors subforum. The big-warning-that-you-can-see-from-the-moon seems an adequate compromise solution, and shutting down necro threads doesn't seem like something that our mod team spend too much time on anyway.