Why do Forum topics close after 30 days?

Help
1

I use a heap of discourse forums (MPU talk, DevonThink, Automators, …) and none of them close threads as quickly as 30 days.

When threads close rapidly, then I don’t have a chance to ask supplementary questions if I missed the window. Since some great discussions are journaling and tags are older that means we need to start new threads instead of extending old ones.

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DEVONthink’s moderators now close topics “three years after the last reply”, which is odd but OK, I suppose. But closing topics after 30 days is strange. I agree with @mlevison – very unusual forum management.

3

Could you specify which category are you referring to? And are you referring to resolved threads in particular?

This thread, for example, is still open after more than 30 days of inactivity: One Way Syncing

4

Help is closed after 30 days to avoid resurrecting old/no longer relevant discussion that generate confusion.

Feature Requests, Bug Reports are closed after 7 days of being marked as solved.

5

The Help category currently closes after 30 days of inactivity, mostly because

(1) replies don’t need to follow templates, thus giving people who want to help less context;
(2) Obsidian is still evolving quickly, adding “I’m having the same problem” can be misleading and confusing as the info in the OP can get outdated.

For these reasons, we close old Help topics and bug reports and feature requests that are marked as solved by the OP or our moderators to encourage people to follow the templates post fresh topics. That makes things easier for everyone.

Other categories like knowledge management and meta should never auto-close. We will also consider making the window longer as Obsidian gets more stable in terms of development speed. Thanks!

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Interesting. So apparently the things I find the most often are in the help category. So I see the limits and didn’t realize they’re not universal.

  • Bugs/Requests - some of us have day jobs closing issues that quickly sometimes means we can’t respond on our own bugs.
  • Help Topics - 30 days made sense a while ago, Obsidian is a whole ton more stable now than it was when I first looked. Questions that I needed help in Nov are still challenges for newer people.

GIven the improved stability why not bump the timeframes to 30 days for bugs and 90 days for help.

If you don’t then as users we learn to game the system - post bugs under help. Post questions in an active in a category like Knowledge Management.

7

It only happens 7 days after the bug or request is marked as “Solved”. Unless a moderator marked your post as solved and you don’t reply within an entire week, I don’t see how it could create a big problem.

It just got bumped into 3 months.

We don’t want anyone to game the system, and I understand the slight inconvenience, but please understand that we introduce these mechanisms are to help people, not bring inconvenience.

Too often we see someone reply to an old post and not receive any replies. Or a help has been marked as solved and someone posts a related but different problem underneath it. People come here to help each other out of kindness, so we want to make the experience great for people who help too, not just for people who ask for help.

If like you said people do start gaming the system because it’s too unreasonable, we’ll for sure rethink things. Right now we’re not seeing that yet, but we’ll keep an eye on that.

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Thanks for the speedy and thoughtful replies.

Bugs - I hadn’t understood, now I do.
Help - bumping it to 3 months, that’s cool I’m impressed by the speed of action.

I generally don’t intend to game systems, I just wanted to highlight the difference. I can’t tell from the discussion if you’re familiar with Systems Thinking. Using this as a lens, I always ask what signals a system sends me. In this case the signal is that help topics might be less valuable than others in the long run.

For the medium term I’m sure that 3 months is good.

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9

I agreed with the suggestion to bump the time longer.

As for “less valuable”, I personally see it more as signalling that Help is more like a rolling ticket system in an actively changing app. If there is ever a thread you think should truly be revisited or revised, you can always flag it, and a moderator can open it.

But yes again I agreed with you. 30 days was short, and not everyone is in the forum frequently.

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This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.