I threw up a couple of topics that I thought might be of interest. One is about a Japanese Bitcoin exchange that offered Bitcoin for nothing for a brief period. There was quite a rush I gather. Views are in single figures, and it's on page 2 in no time. The other was about including the domain name in a Bitcoin domain purchase transaction. I suggested that this may be an alternative to escrow in some situations. Even fewer views, and onto page two in no time also. I would have thought that either of those topics would have aroused a small bit of interest. Instead all the rubbish that is there is constantly being pushed up.
I'm coming to the conclusion that the only way that the discussion board can be revived is to lock every thread on it, and start again from scratch.
Maybe this will happen when the new beta.bitcointalk forum is released. Everything is just thrown in archive and the forum could start fresh. Or there could be a page count limit added to threads which would also stop those massive spam threads from taking over.