They have listings on their site for items from manufactures that have been discontinued for 15 years just for that extra footprint on the web for advertising purposes.
I actually appreciate that, use it as an archive. It has happened that I didn't know what some Surefire product was, for instance, Zsomething, whatever, and an Optics Planet product page will show up in search results, and I'll immediately understand what it was. I've never seen them claim to have something in stock that was discontinued; usually it says discontinued.
One of the problems with the web, and Zebralight, for instance, is an offender, and so is Surefire... is that product pages are removed, and if archive.org doesn't have a snapshot, or if does but the images weren't scraped, you're SOL for figuring something out or trying to show someone something. There's absolutely no reason to remove a product page or change its address. Space is very cheap, and these things don't take up any space anyway.
So whatever else Optics Planet does that sucks, leaving up old product pages certainly is not one of them. I wish that was a standard practice across the web, so that 50 years from now you could see a product that was discontinued in 2005. As it is, things disappear and people forget, and nothing is more frustrating than partially remembering something and not being able to figure it out. Removing product pages is basically gaslighting.
