I agree, mods are never short on work. There is always something for them to do, and always more for them to do than they can do within a day. Automatically locking a thread might be a good idea, but it would need some very careful parameters or it is going to cause a lot of confusion and frustrated users. There will be giants threads that are useful to some degree that will get caught up in this, such as the Wall Observer thread. Then the question becomes, if the OP unlocks the thread will it automatically re-lock after X replies/pages? I think it would either be "abuse-able" in that it could be avoidable, it will be unfortunate for a portion of users or some combination of the two.

I've seen some mods share their personal criteria for this kind of thing, I know there is at least one mod that will lock topics that have been sufficiently answered/discussed. I'm wondering if this is universal amongst the mods, what their individual criteria are for locking threads and if there is a more formal way of alerting the mods about these threads they may have overlooked while doing their other laundry list of duties.