Thank you, I’ve been lurking a bit already. 
It is a “wonderful” world of discovery and despair, isn’t it? 
Gotcha.
Sounds like a reasonable approach to me. Thanks for the hard work!
My view on automatically closing topics
Is it a big problem?
No it is not, less than once a week there is a necropost
Is the only solution auto-closing?
No, admins can also split off the new post into a new topic
So why are they not doing that?
Asked once a admin for a post on an old soapbox topic. That post was problem report without any useful information to debug the issue and the admin rightfully wanted to see a new thread with concise description.
Did that happen?
No, the user was a long time user coming back and did post after this but never started a new topic.
So are people afraid to start a new topic? Yes, I think that is the case, especially if the problem is not well defined or the user not tech-savvy. I think also the admin did feel this problem, it is one of the reasons he did not split off the post into a new topic. At the other hand it was easy enough to dream up a generic title and I would applaud if had been done and is done more often in the future.
I think 30 days is way too short, but that is one opinion. So let let me ask, where did this 30 days come from? Were past necroposts checked on how long after the last reply the necroposts was posted?
My question would be how do you learn that there is a need? Keep in mind
So why not start with something that is “too long” and only if needed reduce the time.
Both questions where answered in this thread by an admin. Simply reading will help…
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I’ve just run a further analysis. Across all of the technical forums, the average time between the last two replies on a topic (from 2023-01-01 and 2024-02-29) - on a per-category basis - is generally no more than about 8 days at most (this includes the non-English categories). There are 2 out of 48 categories that are longer, and those categories have such a small amount of data that a single reply that is longer out than 30 days skews the data set to the point as to render the average meaningless. In those instances, a median calculation is more useful, and for those groups with too little data to yield a useful average in the time period given, the median is ~1 day.
30 days is a perfectly reasonable amount of time, with less than 5 topics across all 48 affected categories that had activity after the second-to-last reply being affected.
So, again, if we see a shift and an increase in reasonable requests to re-open topics older than 30 days, we’ll adjust - but the data analysis shows that the decision is a sound one and will affect a vanishingly small number of topics where a longer period would be warranted. In fact, a smaller number than the number of topics we have to close because they’re getting replies that either (a) re spam or (b) are better served as a new topic rather than adding to an existing one more than 30 days old.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Screen changing resolution without input by me
@mrmazda I’ve moved it for you. As you can see there is a link to it from this topic (that you posted from) as well.
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The explanation prequel written here was not intended for transferral, but thanks anyway. michael_of who I was replying to should get a notification.
Well, ideally you should not have posted it here in the first place.It would have been better to start a topic and post the link to it here. Anyway, I will edit it accordingly. The browser you use is clearly less than optimal.
This should be visible…
The primary reason I can think of is human psychology. Say you set it at 100 days and then reduce that to 80 days, you’ve now “taken something away” from users which breeds anxiety and a feeling of loss. It’s a real and well-known effect of the human psyche.
To clarify my stance in case of confusion: my ideal future is for the OpenSUSE community to have healthy growth.
This requires a balance between the needs of staff, needs of invested users and the needs of new users. This is a very hard act to do right in every instance, as sometimes it requires compromise.
You can look at Arch for a decent case-study in what happens when expectations clash. Back in 2006 when I first encountered Arch it was clear to new users of the forum that Arch is a “you need to grease your own elbows and help yourself” kind of distro. And all was fine. Then it had the explosive growth fuelled by overly zealous advocates which left a lot of people in despair when the standard expected response in the Arch forums was man 5 program.conf, combined with a harsh stance towards for instance necroposting and “asking good questions”. Arch was and is a very welcoming place, but it is not ideal for the everyday user. It’s for the invested user who is willing and interested in learning, as can be seen in the wiki, Arch_terminology#RTFM, FAQ: Why would I not want to use Arch?
Which brings us to my previous questions to staff on this forum. I wanted to know what the expectations on new users were for the forum. And I got an answer that made sense to me. It might have been too vague for people new to Linux forums, that is however only pure speculation on my part and for new users to answer themselves.
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# zypper se -sxi chromium
...
S | Name | Type | Version | Arch | Repository
---+----------+---------+-----------------------------+--------+-----------
i+ | chromium | package | 120.0.6099.224-bp155.2.67.1 | x86_64 | UpdateBP
My browser of choice is SeaMonkey, but since its functionality is bare minimum on Discourse sites (as with Falkon and Pale Moon), I read there with it, then when appropriate, painful as it is, open such threads for writing in Chromium.
After the unlocking I went there to reply, and composed after marking words to quote and clicking “quote”. But after I finished composing, I realized the input pane had added more options above the normal icon set, including a place to add a new title for a new thread, as well as change below, where there was no longer reply button next to close button, but instead one with specific words I don’t remember (that are no longer there now, restored to the expected text “reply”), but to the effect of submitting new thread.
On the 30 days you mean:
No that is not answering the question, also “100 days seems a good number across the board - we had no feedback from any of the mods that they felt that time was too short, including in the non-English sections.” is true so that question is still why 30 and not 100 was chosen.
For the reasoning on why increasing the time is better than increasing the time, I think this is pretty contra dictionary with "For the vast majority of users here, this change will not be noticed at all. "
Thanks, that is good information but not conclusive; for that you should check for the interval between all posts, if a topic was reactivated after a 3 months it is not strange to see a reply on that so that it is no longer the last post. I was also thinking about something else, how long after the last post the necropost was posted, for the case I know it was 8 months.
Because the staff is here every day, and has a good feel of the pulse of the activity of the community. Discourse provides us with a lot of different statistics that we use to measure the health of the community.
Instances like that are outliers, not the norm. That is also the case across other technical forums, where 30 days is most commonly used, so that guidance is also useful.
We could commit to complete analysis paralysis and do nothing, or we can make a decision and implement it, and if it turns out the time period was not appropriate, we can change it.
We’ve opted to make the decision and move forward, knowing that we’re not going to please everyone with what we decide, but that for the vast majority of our users, they won’t even notice the change at all.
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Notifications may get sent, but that doesn’t mean they can be assumed to have been seen at all, much less timely. Most notifications I’m supposed to get from these forums’ threads show up in my provider’s non-disableable “known spam” folder, which I have no access to except by opening its painful and disgusting webmail and digging each one out using little tiny checkboxes more easily missed than hit. Plus I have to remember it needs doing. Timeliness of reply notifications and fresh mental image of the discussion is destroyed. Before the switch to Discourse, this didn’t happen.