Yeah I would say this straddles the line between feature and bug quite tightly.
For some the current behavior is desirable, for others not.
It is a bit of a can of worms cause “reason” needs to be attached to the timer, and then there are very complex edge cases to think about.
- Category A has “auto close in 20 hours”
- Category B has “auto close in 1 hour”
- Topic created in A
- 2 hours pass
- Topic recategorized to B
- What should happen?
- Topic recategorized to A
- What should happen?
I kind of think the current “decision only applies to creation time” is the only easy way to reason about things.