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.