Why there is 3 months limit?

meta
1

Hi folks, how's going? Sometimes I want to write reply to my old topics but they closed bcs of this limit. Why there is 3 months limit and is it possible to remove it? Thanks.

2

It's common practice to close old topics in discussion forums, because they tend to degrade over time (i.e. users coming from search engine results land on an old topic that somewhat resembles the problem they're facing, and reply with something along the lines of "Hey, I know this topic isn't exactly about the problem X I'm facing, but it's somewhat similar so I was wondering if anyone here knows how to solve it"), so it's better to close them and ask users to sart new topics instead.

4 Likes
3

I believe for i.r-l.o and u.r-l.o the reason is mostly because of spam bots trying to comment on old topics. You can request the topic to be re-opened: Meta thread: How to request to opening old thread? - #5 by notriddle

7 Likes
4

Thanks for your message. This seems fine for me.

5

Thanks. Was wondering about this as well.
There were a few topics which contained information, which is now incorrect, and is out of date.
And in other topics I wanted to provide an answer, where it wasn't provided.
While simply creating a new topic and pointing to an old one felt.. incorrect?

6

At least for us regulars, I'd say this is more of a "current ongoing conversation" forum, with individual topics being mostly linear. Plenty of problem solving happens, but in typically in a person-to-person, "your question specifically" manner. As opposed to, say, a "definitively solve this problem" forum with an evolving OP post, comments arranged by some sort of score, meant to be a reference and hopefully kept up to date, with minimal duplication of questions.

In other words, this isn't stackoverflow.

I prefer this format, but the fact that topics are conversations, with no-one going around axing duplicates and trying to keep all answers up-to-date, does have consequences. So yes, as Rust is an evolving language, there are a million threads from a pre-this-or-that feature era which may no longer provide the best guidance. And if you're trying to get your own problems solved, your best bet may be to open a new topic asking a question that has been asked before rather than searching for some definitive thread as if this forum was a reference.

From the perspective of someone used to the format: Without the feature, 40 comment threads from a year ago would be revived with comments that probably couldn't be property replied to without reading the backlog, people would reply directly to comments made by people no longer actively participating in the forum, etc. In fact, that did use to happen before the feature was enabled / before all pre-timeout forums were retroactively closed. It pretty much never led to revived community investment in the topic. Here's the thread that prompted the retroactive closing of relatively ancient topics, which demonstrates such phenomenon pretty well.

I wouldn't worry about it unless you have a specific reason to think it's being cited all the time, or perhaps if it's your own topic and you have a personal interest. You can flag a closed topic and ask the moderators to reopen it, but I strongly suggest you do not immediately do this for a bunch of topics; it's a rare thing to do. I.e. make sure you have a feel for the community and aren't doing something to tax the moderators time which isn't typically done anyway.

Creating a new topic and pointing to the old one is fine, especially if the goal is to revive a question.[1]

  1. If goal is to correct an answer, the million stale threads will lead to a million one-off "actually I'd do it this way today" posts, which... personally at least... would detract from the currently active threads where users are actively invested in some conversation. Personally I'd rather see a fresh tutorial post with something thoughtful written up. ↩ī¸Ž

9 Likes
7

Note that that's fine, so long as it's reviving the conversation or pondering if a new language feature has changed the advice or something -- if you link the old post, the old post will get a backlink at the bottom to the new thread that mentioned the post, even though the old post is in a closed thread.

And people can still edit their posts in old threads, just no necro'ing.

2 Likes
8

I flagged my one of the old topics as "Something Else" and wrote that "please open this and I will reply some important message". After that a moderator write me from pm "I can open it, are you sure". This method works.