I have been participating in many Discourse forums for many years now, and I can’t recall any other that is set this way. I’m struggling to understand why it is done this way. User questions and suggestions rarely lose relevance after 30 days, and users don’t have time to watch forums every day – it’s perfectly reasonable to visit occasionally when trying to solve problems or exploring what other people. Why block people from responding to a topic if it’s relevant, even if some time has passed?
Some topics may be years old and someone might want to resurrect a zombie topic saying “hey, yeah! That happened to me too!” without adding anything new.
You can always start a new topic if you want to discuss your question.
I recently made a similar post on the GNOME Discourse. IMHO depending on the activity level of a forum, it could make sense to have a slightly longer auto-close, but worst case scenario you can always link to an old topic when opening a new one. (It would be nice if Discourse automated this process with something like a “Reply with New Topic” button on expired threads.)
I recognize the irony of bumping this particular Topic, but has there been any progress on this issue?
Certain Discourse forums I frequent [1, 2] have fairly indiscriminate time-based auto-close, and facilitating linking to older conversations while still having a fresh, new conversation thread would be useful under those circumstances.
Basically what might be nice is for there to be an administration setting for replacing the former “Reply” button at the bottom of time-based auto-closed Topics with a somewhat similarly designed “Reply with New Topic”. Here’s a mockup I made using the web inspector:
Again, enabling or disabling this button would be an option in the administration preferences, right next to the settings for the auto-close timeout itself. And calling it “New Linked Topic” (or something) rather than “Reply With New Topic” emphasizes that it would just prefill a link to the closed topic (and possibly duplicate the closed Topic’s category and tags) as a template while opening a draft for a new Topic.
I remember there was a lot of “thread necromancy” going on, especially with things that were resolved. Someone would have posted years ago asking how to do X, and then someone would come along and say “OmniFocus is so terrible for not supporting this feature!”, but the feature was implemented sometime between the thread last being active and the new complainer coming along.
