Should topic threads stay open or be closed after 90 days?

When manually closed, a closing “comment” by the closing user is shown. Otherwise it is a specific bot/meta account being associated with the close action.

I usually see a plain-jane Discourse avatar for the auto-close actions.

It’s programmed in Ruby on Rails, and is open source.

First thing to do would be check for a plugin.

Tagging @Caroline. Without admin access, I don’t want to spend the time to search for one!

The place is here …

After 15 minutes of scrolling down, scrolling down, scrolling down, I found one that might do the trick:

But I’m just barely able to understand SQL, and I have no access to a list of fields and values I might include in a test, nor do I know if the result of the query can be easily applied to remove “closed” status.

Here to :One more vote for staying open. And never let the user close the topic.

Another option is. When someone replies after 90 days, provide a big checkmark ( checked by default ) just above his text view with the comment “Make new thread with a direct reference to the old topic”. Then, when checked, on top just under the title of the new Posting but as separated thread show the linked link of the old thread. So a win win and win.

This can already be done from “…” (next to Reply) > Link icon > New Post. However the feature could be made quite a bit more prominent. I think @DanRathbun has said somewhere this feature used to be a bit easier to find, but I could remember it wrong.

my assumption is, that everything beyond installing a plugin as e.g. fiddling around in the Discourse source or tweaking the database by SQL commands is over the scope of the forums administration and therefore probably no feasible solution.

Keep in mind too, that changes in the forums source code need to be maintained with every update of the forums software, which is an additional expenditure as well as prone to errors.

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Do questions like mine somehow become irrelevant at 90 days? Google Team Drive Support

I don’t see why that should be closed without a response.

@jbennett No it is just the silly auto close bot closing the thread because of inactivity.

As I understand things now, this forum is actually hosted and maintained by Discourse on Discourse servers, so @sam and Jeff would have something to say about weird tweakins’.

That is my understanding as well. And over on the Discourse Forum, I’ve run across at least two instances of Discourse assisting at SQL manipulation of the forum data of the users they host - part of the service that you get when you pay Discourse to host your forum on their servers! I expect that @Caroline can easily get all the help she needs from there.

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Someone should be able to re-open threads closed by System:

but not posts closed by actual users:

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Keep them open!

@jbennett - totally agreed? If the query / bug remains unsolved it should remain open. In the past I have only found an answer to a query after 6 months or even a year and only through threads being kept open and active so that users can add to them.

@DanRathbun makes some very valid points - the fact that he has referenced 6no threads on the same topic is a case in point. Having unsolved (or unsolvable / discussion) topics close after 90 days dilutes the usefulness of the info that users have supplied and results in a huge amount of wasted time in searching for where the discussion went and which post is more current / pertinent that the next.

Yes to this, however there are many ways to skin a cat and and as @jiminybillybob says

Leave them open so we don’t have to keep restarting the threads over and over again… pleeeeease!

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Sort of, we don’t have much say in how Sketchup admins run this forum, we build features and provide options.

The auto closing here is defined by Sketchup staff, so if it is a problem you are going to have to raise it with them :blush:

Just meaning “weird tweakings”, not normal admin settings.

BTW, Sam, the standard Auto-Close feature should have a “close only only solved threads” option.
As it is we’ve come to the conclusion it’s flawed and undesirable.

Oh we have an autoclose on solved after a delay, someone here could swap it around

While I agree there should be an option to only auto close solved threads I don’t think such setting should be used on this forum.

Someone can ask about a problem in the software, someone replies within an hour that it is a known issue and what the workaround is, and that gets marked as the solution. Then someone else can comment 3 years later, saying the new version of SketchUp fixes the underlying problem and no workaround is needed any longer. This is a perfectly valid response to a thread that otherwise would confuse users as its information is outdated.

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Right, … if it had worked this way from the beginning, we’d have learned to live with it.

It is too late now as it has wreaked havoc.

Yes Please!

This is very frustrating - not just on this forum, but on SketchUcation as well as many other forums.

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