I find it a pity (and sometimes even annoying) when a topic has already been closed and a similar topic or problem has to be dealt with in a new thread. This inflates the forum unnecessarily and makes it confusing.
Would it be possible to introduce no time limit, or the creator of the topic to decide for himself whether he/she wants to close the thread?
We could (well, I’m pretty sure) change the thread-closure time limit. But 8 months is a pretty long period of no activity to productively come back to a thread, so I don’t necessarily know that it’s unreasonable.
In my experience we have more of the reverse problem (particularly before the closure system was implemented) of people coming onto old threads and posting tangentially-related or unrelated questions at their ends, resulting in a sprawling thread that doesn’t really have a topic, and leading to unwanted notifications to the original thread creator.
Of course it’s a balance. Some amount of extending the default time I think would be fine, but relying on users to close their own topics: for one I think there’s some technical barriers in the forum software to allowing it, and additionally I don’t think people would reliably close them even if given the capability.
We can also as administrators take the closure timer off of certain threads (and of course reopen them) so for specific one-off outliers we could do things like that to keep something open.
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