Auto close topics or not?

support
1

I see some Discourse forums auto close topics after 6 months. I get why this makes sense, after 6 months of the last reply the topic is probably not relevant anymore and by replying you would notify people that were done with the discussion. Which might not be what you want.

However, since this forum, the developers themselves, don’t seem to apply this practice. I was wondering, how do you feel about auto closing topics? More cons than pros? Of course Discourse already gives a hint about old topics and suggests to reconsider replying to it.

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Here on meta (as its a support community) topics that are not useful anymore are deleted. Also in #support once a question is answered its automatically closed within a month.

In my opinion auto close is a good feature. As you say there are hints, but closing it off tells the user ‘we’re done here. This topic is old please create a new one’ whereas a hint can be ignored etc.

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