I cannot find a setting that would allow me to specify the number of days after which if someone replies to a topic, it doesn’t get bumped up to the top on the “latest” tab.
Topics only get bumped to the top if there is a response (or you have the auto bump setting on).
Thats what, I don’t want it to come to top even if someone replies to it if the original topic was created n days ago.
If it’s in one particular category you could suppress it from latest, but if you’re talking generally then I can’t think of a way.
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Hmm. I found this: Discourse-no-bump: prevent users from bumping topics
But still this is not exactly what I want.
This would practically make all “older” topic die out. You would only get newly created topics and those without any “gap” or “cooling period” (when there was no replies), in your latest. It would seem to go against the usual wish to not always create new topics, but first search for existing ones to continue, doesn’t it? But maybe you do have a use case for this. (I can see how your latest may start to dry out if there isn’t enough new topics or topics with constant replies, though).
I am not aware of any setting allowing this (=If I’m not mistaken, there isn’t any. As said, it seems rather counter-intuitive to want to run a forum this way, except special use case). You could achieve this with some custom coding/plugin.
Note: I had created a topic about bumps when its last post is edited, but this doesn’t seem what you’re after at all. ( "No bump" option when editing last post in a topic? )
EDIT: I’m just thinking about this: The functionality telling you there is already some existing topics when you want to create a new one would even seem to go against what you want to do.
I am working on a political forum that incentivizes creating topics that get likes. So to prevent users from abusing the bump up to get more likes I want to prevent bump up for topics older than n days. Also to prevent users from creating new topics I am working on a plugin that will assign new topic quota to each user.
And you rightly said, all this won’t make sense for a regular community. In my case because getting likes on topics is incentivized and because topics are of political nature rather than knowledge-base old posts can be safely muted from showing up on the top.
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So, you want to do what most admins here try to avoid. I love it 
Usually, people adapt. I’m convinced you will have clever cookies who will soon figure out creative ways to game the system if it’s possible. For example, you could link to your old topic from a new one (simply in answers, no need to be your topic). Did you though about doing something to prevent this? (maybe it gets automatically irrelevant as the topic gets older).
Oh OK, you want to use the topic creation as a fixed start date for your count. I initially understood you wanted to base your “n days” on the last post date and for your count to be relative to this.
Just an idea for you to maybe explore: You could rely on Polls rather than likes, and set the polls to automatically close after your “n days”. It would be another way to do it. Maybe it wouldn’t totally answer your use case. You would probably need a way to automatically attach polls to topic creation with your “n days” automatic close. ( Create a poll that others can vote on )
Or you could also maybe try to have an adapted version of this plugin and only allow a “reaction” during your “n days” ( Retort - a reaction-style plugin for Discourse )
You could alternatively run a script to move the topics reaching “n days” in an archive category, and/or close them, and/or mute them.
You could unlist them after a time
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Basically you are describing Reddit. The idea is time weighs so heavily on a topic that it has to be exponentially popular to still be on the homepage after a week. Is that the goal?
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Exactly! However, for that I will be using the hot-topics-plugin which is currently marked as broken and needs some work. In the meanwhile I wanted to see if I could prevent bump ups older than n day in a quick and easy way.
Oh OK. It seems far more clear said like that
Ok, so the only real “reward” would be to stay one the frontpage. I didn’t understand correctly.
People with the most liked topics get free mobile topup or similar prize on regular basis until the forum takes off.