I like that. I've seen people bring corals from ancient times back to the club, so it's not guaranteed dead
Constant pings to people who haven't been on in ages can add confusion to which threads are actually active, which you can't see right now if you just look at the "last updated" threads. Plus you end up with a thread that's more Barcode than human.
But without those periodic messages bumping threads to the top, I feel that threads would get forgotten or lost faster. I think these messages sometimes get people to look for the coral in their tanks