There’s a Discourse setting, “warn reviving old topic age,” that displays a warning “[w]hen someone starts replying to a topic where the last reply is older than this many days.” It’s currently set to the default of 180 days (approximately six months). I’ve seen that there’s also an option for automatically closing older topics.
Any strong feelings against setting that warning to 15 days? I know that it won’t stop necromancers, but it may help casual users realize that they should start a new topic.
Even a month seems “not old” to me, so I’d vote against changing the warning to too soon after it’s opened. But yeah, ~6 mo is indeed pretty long.
People sometimes just don’t have time to come back, so, regarding the auto-lock, that just seems wrong. I think they should be locked if there’s a good reason. But otherwise, leave it open, is my thinking. Auto-lock causes a lot of disparate threads to be created, I’ve seen, and that makes searching harder.
Should we close old discussions? I spoke about the warning, because I believe it covers the rendered portion of the message composer, and for my purposes, if I go through a bunch that trigger that message it would annoy me (despite the fact that it might not actually affect me as a mod, it would have as a Regular). So that is my thoughts on the warning.
However, necros be necro-ing.
I feel that we either solve the problems, or Hugo moves on and makes a problem irrelevant. And I would like to encourage contemporary documentation of current issues, rather than commenting “5 months later”.
I don’t have a strong opinion about this, because I know a lot of people joining aren’t as comfortable or familiar with Discourse. For me, when I join a new instance, I don’t necro, I “reply as a new thread”, if I want to continue a conversation. And while I would love to have @discobot explain that, I am not sure it would move the needle for us.
I could look and see if there is a prior conversation about closing them, but meh, let’s roll with just how meta this is, and discuss here. I would ask: is there any response you’ve seen by a non-admin/mod-person after, say, a month, that added value to a post? How about 3 months? 6 months?
There’s a long-running thread, Hugo as a documentation tool , that tracks the state of Hugo themes and features for documentation sites. It frequently goes for months between posts, but every post tends to be a useful notification of some advancement in the field. (i.e. people creating new documentation site themes.)
I feel like you have a point to make, but I don’t quite get it. If you find that thread helpful, then that is groovy.
The same benefits from having a single thread would be to use the search/category/tagging and subscription functionality in Discourse to keep updated on documentation talk. It is more complicated, but I bet folks tracking documentation tools would grok it.
On the other side, replying to very old threads that have already closed can annoy the original folks, and can refer to vastly different versions of Hugo, which reduces the value of a given thread, requiring manual editing to reduce the noise added to something that may have answered a question for a particular version.
And if we had shut down that initial thread, I am confident that all those posts about Hugo doc tools would have still been posted, but would have potentially had more interaction, because when a person opened them they’d see one or two replies, and could jump in, whereas the original one requires “years” of posts to get through.
See, it’s fine either way. Closing old threads is a way to turn over the soil, get more contemporary interaction, and create distinct contexts by which to archive and search for answers.
Lately we’ve had folks responding to topics that haven’t been updated in 2 years. Surely we ought to close those topics, so we can encourage “modern” versions of Hugo for use.
I’d say six months is more than enough time to keep a conversation going, while discouraging new forum users from @-mentioning folks that may no longer be active, or have moved on to a new version.
@lws, would six months have allowed that thread to continue?
I sometime drop off for a couple of weeks, and then power reply upon return.