We currently leave topics open for discussion indefinitely. This lets people get back with solutions to old problems (which happens!) or have long slow discussions about a problem for years (which also happens).
But it also has some issues, notably:
Legitimate users are less likely to get feedback if they ask a followup question in an already existing topic (it is not obvious the topic is now unanswered, more cognitive load needed to understand the previous posts in the topic)
There’s an increased frequency of strange posts reviving old topics. This is likely LLM-generated text attempting to create users with some history of contributions to avoid spam filters.
Since we have a lot of legitimate discussions that are quite slow, I think a sensible automatic closing limit is at least 6 months, maybe even 12 or 18 months.
I am personally on the fence on this, so I’d be happy to get feedback from others.
Oh, I noticed somebody else already enabled 12 month autoclose on all categories. Anyway, good to make sure people know this and are OK with the change.
I’ll also note that we can set a separate auto-closing for topics that are marked as Solved, which seems to have fewer downsides and could likely be a bit more aggressive (say a week or two).
I made the change in my role of SGB member as there was no opposition by the developers. I also followed your suggestion for a longer delay. I thought this is a minor change, which would not require wider discussion or official vote, as this is not affecting anyone’s capability for creating topics or getting help. This should mainly affect those who are moderating Stan discourse and answering many questions.
The change affects only new topics, and I see this message in every new topic
I assumed that everyone else see that message, too, so I assumed everyone who is affected by this, knows about this. Can you confirm, if you don’t see that message in new topics?
Moderators can also edit the closing date or remove it (there is a pen symbol next to that announcement), if they think there are topics that should live longer than 1 year after the last post.
I’m fine with getting more feedback, and I’m fine if you eventually remove it or make the time longer.
I made the change in my role of SGB member as there was no opposition by the developers. I also followed your suggestion for a longer delay. I thought this is a minor change, which would not require wider discussion or official vote, as this is not affecting anyone’s capability for creating topics or getting help. This should mainly affect those who are moderating Stan discourse and answering many questions.
The change affects only new topics, and I see this message in every new topic
I assumed that everyone else see that message, too, so I assumed everyone who is affected by this, knows about this. Can you confirm, if you don’t see that message in new topics?
Moderators can also edit the closing date or remove it (there is a pen symbol next to that announcement), if they think there are topics that should live longer than 1 year after the last post.
I’m fine with getting more feedback, and I’m fine if you eventually remove it or make the time longer.
I’m a happy Stan user and I’ve posted a few topics where I received tons of help and insight from other users and developers. From my point of view, topics should be closed by the original poster once an “operative answer” is marked, so that the thread can serve as a clear reference for the community.
That said, sometimes a topic gets revived after months or even years — and that can actually be valuable. It gives the community a chance to see new ways of tackling the same issue, or to learn about improvements in the software that weren’t available before.
I think there is a misunderstanding what closing a topic means, as I haven’t seen anyone ever closing a topic. Maybe 1% of original posters mark the topic solved, but that doesn’t close the topic.
Months between replies and lively long discussion are not a problem. The new topics stay open as long as there is a new post in one year. Closing a topic does not stop continuing the discussion in a new topic that links to the old topic. Often the old topics have misleading title and many messages that are not that relevant for the new information, and a new topic would be more clear and reach bigger audience. Autoclosing enforces more informative topic names and summarising possible relevant previous discussion.
You can find several replies commenting that a new topic would have been
better, and based on that, I really did not expect anyone wishing the topics to stay open forever.
To collect some data, for a few weeks I’ll collect topics where after more than one year after the last post someone replies and I classify the replies as a) relevant or b) would have been better as a new topic. My hypothesis is that b) wins. You can help by collecting topics in which you think a) did hold (you can send these to me as private message, and I can summarise the results).
Thanks for sharing your opinion. Now we have one vote for keeping the topics open, one on the fence, and about 10 who agreed on using autoclose. Let’s see if we get more opinions. I think I’m about 9, in scale from 1-10, in favor of autoclosing, so you can still convince me to remove autoclosing (or someone else can remove it, and I won’t fight).
Oh, I see. It’s probably my lack of experience with Discourse that made me misunderstand what “closing a topic” actually means. Yes, I did mark it as solved.
Thinking about it now, closing a topic might actually help restart the discussion under a clearer and more descriptive title — which could be more useful for us, the user base.
