the worlds oldest internet thread

[BrendAn]

wondering if anyone knows what the worlds longest running thread is.

the never ending story on here started in February 2008.  surely it must be close to a record.

[FlyBoy1960]

There’s actually no officially recognised “world’s longest running thread,” because it depends on what you mean by longest:

• Oldest continuously active discussion system: probably Usenet, which is still running today in various newsgroups. (UK Asian Forum Daily News)

• Oldest continuously active forum community: often cited as The WELL, which is still operating. (Wikipedia)

• Longest individual forum thread by replies/pages: this is much harder to verify. Some forum threads have exceeded 200,000 replies, and there are claims of threads with millions of posts on very large forums, but there is no central record keeper. (XenForo)

One famous example often mentioned in internet culture is the debate about whether an airplane can take off from a conveyor belt, which ran for years across multiple forums and accumulated enormous numbers of posts. (Reddit)

If you're talking about a single thread that has stayed active for the longest period of time, there are forum threads that have been continuously updated for 10–20+ years, particularly on aviation, car, gaming, and hobby forums. (Straight Dope Message Board)

A more interesting question might be:
What is the oldest internet discussion thread that is still receiving new posts today?

That would probably involve digging through old Usenet archives from the 1980s, and some of those discussions may still technically be alive in descendant groups.