On phpied.com today, there's their look at their needs in a phpBB module - and how they ended up solving it on their own.

I had this request to implement a feature on a phpBB board whereby topics older than one month to get deleted. A quick search on phpbbhacks.com revealed a result - Auto Lock hack, but it had a disturbing note saying that it's not recommended for larger boards, although I couldn't figure out why. Anyway, the hack looked too involved, with DB changes, new Admin Panel options, etc., so I decided to hack something together quickly. Turned out to be pretty easy. Here' s the result.

Their version uses a simple SQL statement to do a perioding update on the table, marking the ones over a month old as locked. If the update fails, an email is sent. Then, so that no cron job would be needed to make these updates, a semi-random item was placed in the page to run when the user accesses it normally...