But you agree that year old posts being inserted as new is a terrible idea!
The opposite of that is to keep chronology so that when a duplicate topic is created by someone and merged to an established topic, the new post gets put it at the right point.
The existing behaviour shoves the posts in a totally random point … in my case about 200 posts back and ‘2 years ago’ despite having dates of ‘1 day ago’.
In addition to this, when listing the posts in latest or category view, the most recently dated post (which comes from the newer merged thread) is marked … but it’s actually buried in the thread way earlier.
Just experienced this and agree that it is a difficult problem. Had two parallel discussions on exact same topic and interleaving merged list according to chronology looks like it might have worked better. Latest post to original (merged into) topic is now quite a ways up in the thread. Tradeoff hard to analyze at glance.