[theme-reviewers] Decaying of older themes and mass emailing users pre 3.0 to update their theme.

[Philip M. Hofer (Frumph)]

I brought it up a year ago and it's about that time again.

Notifying theme authors up to a certain revision requesting them to update 
their themes; also decaying / removing themes up to a certain point.

One of the things that I am concerned about (and help  me with this) is the 
deprecated functions in the core.  How long do those deprecated functions 
stay in the deprecated file before being completely dropped, or do they 
stay - forever as deprecated?

Anyways, back to mass notification - our earliest theme dates 2008-7-25 
right now.  That's almost 4 years.

The roadmap:  http://wordpress.org/about/roadmap/   shows that that, that 
particular theme was released directly after 2.6 - as we know the theme 
coding standard has increased exponentially since then.

I would be inclined to think that themes made previous to December 18, 2009 
(2.9) be contacted and request for theme update, removal or put on the 
"adoption" list.

Last year someone mentioned that the theme's list can have extra coding 
installed to denote "out of date", "needs updating", "up for adoption", 
"featured", etc..  in the actual search results.   I do not know what came 
of that or if that is even something we can do.

What are your thoughts, since I'm necro'ing this topic.

Note: Necro'ing = bringing a topic back from the dead.

- Phil