Locking of old threads

General
6

Thanks for all this feedback.

I think this is a good example of survivorship bias; As a moderator, I am exposed to many situations where a thread should be closed but wasn't, and I don't see situations where value would be created by reopening the thread for a follow-up answer, but wasn't.

Just to reiterate FAQ: Why are Topic-Threads Automatically Closed After a Certain Amount of Time?

  • Discourse just doesn't deal with threading very well, long topics very quickly become impossible to follow. I've been experimenting with the discourse Q&A plugin, but it's not stable on our site yet.
  • With StackOverflow, all "replies" are "answers", and so new users with related but distinct questions are led to pose a new question. On a discourse forum, the more natural course of action for a new user following the same pattern is to pose a reply - even if that belongs as a new topic.
    • We had a lot of issue with this before being more aggressive about auto-closing.
    • Splitting those replies into new threads is relatively costly, requiring manual intervention.

If I had to guess (with no data to support this), I suspect the problem of novice-users posting replies where a new-topic is warranted likely dominates (more likely to occur and is more problematic to the forum) the other problem.

I genuinely think that the "Create a new topic and link back" pattern is the more appropriate one for a discourse site, given the differences in design between SO and discourse. It's no more clunky than SO forcing users with a question related to an existing one to pose that as a new question. Auto-closing does make things more clunky for people to share new solutions, but given the constraints of discourse, not auto-closing creates a host of other issues.

Sadly this isn't a feature supported by discourse or a custom plugin yet.

I have two ideas to improve things,

  1. Trust Level 4 users are able to reopen a thread and comment. I know dean personally and so was happen to bump you up to TL4. I'd love to grow our group of trusted sustainers who are free to edit and add this kind of thing... if you have recommendations?

  2. I posed this problem above as a survivorship bias problem — I see the problem we're optimized on but not the one your talking about — so as an experiment I'm tweaking the closed topic message slightly, to expose myself to more situations where people really want to add their comment to an existing thread.
    This is still clunkier than it can be, but at least I'll quickly have a clearer idea of how many people are trying to add solutions to older threads. If a good number come in, I'll add this to our discourse development queue.

The message now reads

closed %{when}
<br><br>This topic has been closed.
<br><br>If you have a query related to it or one of the replies, 
start a new topic and refer back with a link.
<br><br>If you would like to add a solution to this thread, 
please send it to @economicurtis as a Direct Message.
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