I’m talking about the whole “This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.” thing.
Sometimes, a newcomer sees an interesting topic and is upset that he can’t participate anymore. Sometimes, new information comes up that can be very helpful to the people who were part of the old discussion. While I don’t think that anyone would want to participate in a topic from 10 years ago, I think 30 days is a little too much…uhm, a little too little?
Anyway, if possible, I think it would be nice to extend it to something like 90 days or 180 days (like Reddit). I’m curious what most people think is the optimal cutoff.
In your opinion, after how many days is it ok to lock a topic?
The short limit is trying to target users who revive an already resolved thread with “I have the same problem” replies, which creates noise for the original poster. I remember a number of cases where >30 <90 day idle messages were revived in this way, which is why I went with that number. I’m not strongly against increasing it, but it will result in some more replies like mentioned above.
I’m not necessarily convinced that democracy is the best way to handle a decision like this (shocking to hear, I know!), but –
Isn’t this managed pretty well by users (even new users, right?) being able to post a link to the closed post in their own post? Everyone benefits from them connecting back to the original discussion, and it also shows that the user did their homework. But it allows them to ask their follow-up question without disturbing OP.
The policy doesn’t need to be the same for all categories, in any case. The add-on and suggestion categories do not expire for example, and the learning effectively category is set at 90 days instead of 30. I think at least for the help categories, 30 may still make more sense.
Based on past experience, I think that the time depends on the category in which the post is made initially. The edits made later don’t affect the time.
I presume the category started at 30 days, and I bumped it to 90 days later. I don’t think Discourse applies the changes to existing topics. Discourse lets topics expire after either first or last post, and the categories here are set to be based on time of last post, not first.
I am not very sure of the current behavior. But, in the past, the posts I made in the Anki Desktop category were closed after 30 days of inactivity even if you moved them to the Suggestions category.
