I believe that the recently active threads box only shows threads that have been active in the last 48 hours, so I don't think this is possible.
That seems highly unlikely. Oh! That would account for it being shorter recently! Did you get this belief just from personal inspection?
Yes. I noticed that when the list was short, threads would disappear from it after 48 hours had past. It hasn't occured to me before, as the limiting factor used to be the maximum number of threads (10 and now 20), not the time.
Being backwards compatible! SO... after having been away from the server for a very long time I found my old "mining box" (= shulker box) with a lot of raw copper in it. That just screams to be smelted, and fortunately for me I have this giant furnace which I've (re)build.... I dunno, back in 2015 or so? Originally this had regular furnaces in them but as you can see I replaced those with blast furnaces (I don't even remember doing that). You gotta hand it to both Mojang & Aikar.. stuff still works. Speaking of things that still work... and this is why I always used wool for my redstone stuff and also set up signs which explain which circuit does what. Of course... I have no idea how I managed to set any of this up anymore but at least I know what does what Good times!
Reminds me of when I had my super smelter on SMP6. I enjoyed throwing everything into it to get it mere seconds later.