I've been at some respectable forums and some not so respectable forums. They let a lot of things slide at Skyscraper City, which is probably the largest forum I frequent, and some moderators even get in on the "trolling" in certain threads. Though that's a hugely diverse community in terms of culture of origin and that's just the atmosphere there. They have no thread revival rules generally, but mostly the moderators just police for hardcore trolling, porn, and improper crediting of images from Flickr.
PC is one of the few I've been to that does have a revival rule.
It's part of the changes Live made because he didn't want it to serve as just a "catch-all" forum and wanted to turn it into a discussion-oriented forum and eliminate news-only posts. Razor Leaf must not have seen the discussion potential in such a thread. That or he didn't think the member base would be mature enough to not ostracize someone in favor of breast milk based products. I dunno.