Topics carry automatic close settings when moved to another category

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).

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.

إعجاب واحد (1)

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.