i've noticed threads get auto-locked after 3 months without any answer so i guess that's considered as old?
therefore, answering or bringing new on-topic aspects into threads that had an answer less than 3 months ago should be considered as valid?
if not, i would recommend to either shorten the timespan for auto-locking or stop cutting off discourses artificially as done by calisro on this thread.
that way, forum members might have a potentionally less frustrating experience and mods would have less to care about, a win-win situation from my POV.
Thanks for raising this @redongh - always good to talk about these things.
We close old topics as we've found that topics get off topic with people asking similar questions.
The problem is old threads which were started before we turned on the auto locking don't get auto locked.
Though looking at that thread it was only Nov 2019 which was after that date so I think it was on the 3 month auto cutoff rule.
I suspect that the automation isn't 100% was the reason the thread got closed as it fit the pattern of a reply on an old thread.
What we should do is make sure we close all those old threads, then we can rely on the automation 100%. I think we discussed this before @Animosity022 and decided not to for some reason - I wonder if there is a better way now?
Maybe we should change the 3 month auto-lock period to make it shorter to encourage the creation of new topics?
Last we looked, I think it auto bumped the topics back up. I can take a look again and see if we can just close them out without doing that as maybe it's smoother now.
Sonarr forums do 2 months to close and it's easier to make that change in either direction.
I think 2 months is better. When we looked into closing the old topics it was definitely bumping all the topics on close and that's why we decided to deal with leaving them.
I need to do some testing on the closing the old topics as I think you can do via a script rather than on the site, but want to validate as I think it can be done.
There is a script to do it. But read the discourse forum because it still seemed to bump the old threads. There may be a second script we could run to update the dates again so impact may be minimal.
I'm pretty sure I found the same script you are talking about and can't test it out until later tonight as that does seem to do what we want.
I also closed out some old posts via the select all and that doesn't seem to bump anything anymore either but you can only do 30 at a time and that's just brutal.
I think the script will work but want to test on a few and validate.
Well, I got 99% of what I wanted with the CLI version. It does mark everything closed and does not bump everything, but they do show up as unread since they are closed at the time.
Assuming folks see that, you can just read what you want at the top as new stuff will be on the top and just "Dismiss" the rest in one button click.
Trying to mark things unread for people would create some havoc I think as there isn't a slick way I can think off offhand to address that.
