I think this is a very powerful tool for keeping documentation topics clean. I would have this on most documentation topics on meta.
It means people can reply to them but they know upfront that replies are like tears in the rain. If you want something permanent:
Open a new topic
or
Edit the OP
Even though we can do this pruning by hand it is tedious. Plus, on a psychological level, when a computer does something cause “these are the rules of the ball game”, it feels way better than us humans intervening. (oh why are you making up this rule now, not fair)
I think we might also want to retain replies that have a certain threshold of likes, just in case?
Other than that I think there’s clear need for this based on our usage at least, in the “first post wiki” kinda deals. It would have to be a per-topic setting though, right?
I like this. We have a lot of “stickies” (pinned posts) that might get a lot of heavy use now as we transition over to Discourse, but later won’t be as relevant. I don’t want to have to remake the posts every so often.
