Right now, most topics automatically lock after 14 days for, I dunno, moderation purposes, or something. This limitation does not exist for Gitlab Issues, and Discourse can be a more informal and less fraught way to discuss issues than Gitlab.
In general this short of an automatic timeout seems counterproductive in terms of boosting engagement given the level of activity on this particular Discourse instance. While I imagine you have a strong historical reason for auto-locking old topics, could you experiment with a significantly longer timeout (or disabling the timeout entirely)?
I dunno, like 6 months or something seems both long enough and short enough to match people’s software-update cycles while avoiding resurrecting significantly outdated threads. The timeout could be shorter for certain boards than others, and the timeout could also be shortened for especially busy topics, if Discourse supports doing so.
My $0.02: as I’ve become more comfortable with Discourse, I do appreciate the auto-lock that prevents old threads from being bumped, but two weeks feels too short to me. I would rather set it to something like two months.
I don’t see how it’s related to moderation at all. If a topic gets bumped due to spam, users will surely flag it.
I was not aware that the 14 day period was adjustable, I always regarded it as a bug of the forum software.
I told you a few times that 14 days was too short, as we are not all fulltime GTK devs, so some of us need longer than 14 days to work again on a problem, to find a solution or to have a related question. I know of no other medium with a 14 days period, and often I see people coming back after a few weeks. A 6 months or 3 months autoclose would be OK, 30 days is also an improvement.
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.