I just got 7 posts from back in 2023 deleted. It looks like someone is reporting a lot of old posts.
@mprep: why merge those? What happened to this?
Old post: We generally do not moderate posts this old for on-topicness, substantiveness, multi-posting, and other "cleanliness" issues.
AFAIK that's for reports and those weren't reported. I have an automated bot that detects potentially mergeable posts and I've recently started going through its backlog and merging posts that violate rules 21 and / or 32.
I thought the unwritten exception was when the last post was more than 24 hours ago. You can't seriously expect me to edit a single last post in a topic weeks or even months in a row, that means users following the topic won't see it in their Watchlist.
I personally prefer new posts instead of editing the last post, so I know where to keep reading. There's no forum feature to keep track of edited updates.
There is no such exception, though consecutive posts by OP are simply considered bumps and thus limited to once per 24 hours. Once that post is no longer relevant as a bump (e.g. someone else posted something, a new bump was posted), rules 21 (old bumps should be deleted) and 32 (no consecutives except bumps and OP's reserved posts) kick in.