Responding to "solved" topics

We have people finding old posts via Google that were solved ages ago. Because they think they have the same problem, they just post their own dump on the bottom and hope for answers. Most regular users tend to ignore “solved” topics though - so this doesn’t end in happy users :confused:

Might it be useful to add some kind of information when posting into a solved topic that mentions this somehow?

You are responding to a topic that was already marked as “solved”.
You are more likely to get a new set of eyes on your problem by creating a new topic.

I suggest closing topics if they are definitively solved and further responses make no sense.

You can also set the category preferences so that topics in that category auto-close (x) days after the first post, or (x) days after the last reply, if that works better for you.

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Auto-close (x) days after being marked as solved?

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That’s not a feature at the moment, but looks like it’s pr-welcome

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I think in practice “auto close after solved” would be very very VERY similar to auto close (x) days after last reply.

The only reason not to do that, is if the solution topics are mixed into a category that has non-solution based topics.

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I would love to be able to use the action of “Marked as Solved” to trigger this timer. We use it for Q&A and for Problem resolution.

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Sort of, you get to close stuff faster if you have auto close after solved, cause you would likely set timer a lot shorter.

For example, in our support category I would set:

“auto close after last reply” to 2 months
“auto close after solved” to 2 days

You want to give people a chance to necro a reply to a support question to a degree, but once it is solved, you want to close it pretty quickly.

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