I have used Discourse for a long time. And I get EXTREMELY annoyed when people bump 1-2 year old threads that are inactive. And today while looking on the forum, it dawned on me that there was an auto close feature. It can be applied to topics or even a whole category.
Its your lucky day, I think the staff added it.
This has been a feature for a long time. Why add it now?
I agree! Also, I don’t always feel comfortable manually closing threads upon request unless there is clear violations to the forum guidelines.
So, I have updated the forum settings to automatically close topics when the last response is 6 months old.
What do you all think about that? Do you think that timeframe is good? Or do you think it should be longer or shorter?
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The time frame is good for a community like Glitch.
No more huge bumping! Except… the fact that @system would bump all threads.
Is there a way to close it if no one has posted in 2 weeks?
Nah, that would be a bit too short. I say 6 months is the perfect interval.
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How about of a 3 months.
Why this of post has no timer close?
It does. it just dissapears after 2 posts
Sounds good to me 
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So, Discourse kinda works on a feature system. Settings are applied to topics when the setting is applied to the category. If no settings are applied to the category, then no setting will be applied to posts. But if there is a change, only topics created after that change will be affected.
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That makes sense. 
It is also a db issue. Imagine if all of the topics were to be changed. It would cause a lot of lag for everyone.
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Thanks all!
Let’s keep it set to 6 months for now. If we start to see that this is not doing enough to prevent the resurrection of outdated info, then we can shorten it.
If I do that, I will let you know first!
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@tasha I think this is absolutely brilliant and a perfect timescale, but I feel like topics in #feature-ideas shouldn’t be closed automatically so people can continue to discuss suggestions and give their thoughts on how to improve.
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The point is to stop bumping. Because when you create a topic, your notification automatically goes to watching. Meaning, you get every notification about it.
The bumping can be useful, but its a bit annoying at times. Not sure how to fix that.
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A lot of bumps I have seen (recently) have been people answering questions that have been answered. And a lot of off-topic discussions.
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You are in luck @Pufferfish101007! I didn’t add the auto-close feature to feature-ideas since that could interfere with votes.
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