when do the editors choose to close a thread?

[Samuraid]

5. A threadreceives many posts. An example of this would be a photo thread. Those tend to get big and we usually close them at 500 posts for database reasons (that I don't entirely understand, but eh.)

Honestly, it doesn't matter that much whether one topic has 500 posts or two topics have 250 posts. The database queries require about the same amount of work, especially since each page of a topic is limited to 25 posts or so.

It does get annoying, however, to have to click through tons of pages...