Is there a reason why the Forum needs to close topics after 30 days?
Most of these topics have a good shelf-life. And they come up repeatedly with variations. Don’t we want to continue a discussion rather than need to recap in a new thread?
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maybe 30 days is rather quick but in general a topic that has gone for a long while with no activity is not that relevant and late activity usually can be confusing. also, people will be less likely to read that thread. and, of course, activity about something new should always be in a new thread no matter how active this one is. it is common to see “me, too” kinds of posts in old threads. those should be new threads, too. just my opinion and thought well within 30 days.
I think that 30 days is the default, but it it easy to change.
You CAN daisy-chain a new topic off a closed Topic. But it is neither intuitive nor does it follow Discourse’s own odd approach.
You’d expect to highlight text in the closed Topic and a ‘Quote’ indicator to pop-up… like it does within a Topic.
Instead, you click the Share a Link gadget. clicking that pops up a dialog. click the “+New Topic” gadget.
This links to the Top of the Topic rather than the specific Reply in the chain.
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30 days seems reasonable to me. if you want a topic to stay open longer, post your reason why.
This is a new forum. (Well less than a year old.) So we’re slowly questioning all the features & settings.
But examining the threads in the Maillist archives showed that quite a few discussions had extended lulls and then became active again.
Particularly interesting are the recurrent themes in problems. Having them as disconnected threads obscures how widespread the effect is upon users.
The repeated discussions are what usually lead to changes to make features more intuitive. So anything that makes these discussions more thorough also leads to better design changes.
what do you think the number of days should be?
I’d rather hear other people’s thoughts. That is why I brought up the question instead of proposing a change.
a few weeks back I found answers to a couple topics from back march or april of this year… but since the topic was closed, I didnt think of creating a new topic and link to the old, so my answers are now gone with the wind, I didn’t needed the info myself, and since it was no way to save it here without creating a new topic, I just dropped the case…
Some times you find an answer 3-4-5 month after the question was raised… and not everyone knows or think about that its possible to link a new topic to an old…
So 6 month to a year…
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I just looked at the topics I have created (4) and they are all still open.
- A Feedback last messaged in January.
- An Ideas last messaged in February
- A non categorized topic last messaged in April
- And a Development topic from this month.
I was trying to see how a thread could be reopened to discover they were not closed.
Is it only the Help category that closes? Maybe Help topics should be kept open while other categories close.
Yes. I think only Help topics close.
It is probably related to the Discourse feature to mark a reply as a Solution.
In 2015, the Discourse support forum had a single file patch to enable quoting from closed topics. I wonder why this didn’t stay in the program?
Agree on at least 6 months. I propose 1,5 year to cover the approximate lifetime of one maintenance release.
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I have come over at least one other post posted as help, that I wanted to reply to when it was 2-3 months old.
I have also had one og my own threads close and wanted to post in it when it had gone 1,5 months, I had just put that spesific thing on hold for a while and then it was closed when i came back.
I personally think 6 months would be a nice time.
You cant quote from an old post to a new one, but you can link to it, and if you do, I think it shows a small preview of it, but not the hole post if its longer.