Topics carry automatic close settings when moved to another category

Feature
1

Yesterday we found out that user System had closed a topic in a circumstance where it shouldn’t have done anything. After discarding the idea of our server reaching singularity, we found what the actual problem was. A bug that I bet you can also reproduce:

  1. Set a category to close topics after N hours.
  2. Create a topic in that category.
  3. Move the topic to a different category that has no automatic close settings (say, because it had been misfiled in the wrong category).

EXPECTED

The topic remains open because it sits in a category where topics are not closed automatically.

ACTUALLY

The topic closes N hours after its creation regardless, because it carried the former category setting when moved away.

I think this bug has certain entity as described. This automatic closing from user System is done silently, and we only realized the topic had been closed after a user willing to respond complained (they thought we had closed the topic in a heavily handed moderation way).

2

I would say this is as expected. The topic had auto-close set at the time of creation in the category it was created in. Moving it to another category wouldn’t affect that.

1 Like
3

Mmmok, now that this happened in our forum a second time (a user creating a topic in the wrong category and then me moving it to the right one), I see that there is a notice telling you that the topic will be closed automatically, and then in the moderation actions there is an options to reset auto-close.

Good enough for this corner case. Thank you for your quick reply.