Because this decision and implementation was rushed 
You have to read the whole thread. The poster @Thomas_Tempelmann who âre-openedâ it, who surely is a long time and experienced Xojo user felt in the trap not realizing that this was a very old thread. He only saw âOct 17â and thought it referring to âOct 2020â but not October a few years ago. Happened already to me as well :-(.
I think youâre missing the point, it had a reply 3 days ago, yet the system that auto-closes threads for having no activity in the past 6 months decided to close it. I assume it was an error by the person who manually closed all old threads.
I donât think thatâs what happened. What I think happened is:
- they changed the rules for the forum so all new topics will auto-close after 6 months of no activity
- they changed the forum rule to close old topics older than X years, so even if the topic had a post 3 days ago, 1 month ago or 5.9 months ago, the topic was closed
Edit: I think 6 months is a short time for a topic to be closed. More so if the topic is related to API 2.0 and the code/information will be valid for years to come.
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I didnât think it was that big of an issue, maybe 1-2 posts a week.
<-sarcasm->But I really enjoyed going through all my ânew updatesâ last night that werenât actually new updates they were just messages of the threads being locked. <-/sarcasm-> So Iâve probably spent/wasted more time doing that than Iâve ever spent/wasted dealing with necroâd threads. 
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I am with Thomas: if this software would show the full date, all will be fine, but it doesnât (as further discussed in the mentioned thread).
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What I have seen in other forums, is when that happens one of the mods comment on that topic and close it or split it as needed leaving a comment that the topic was closed because the information is not longer valid/correct/relevant. No need to auto-lock everything.
I think we all agree on this, that will be perfect the perfect world. Iâm just nor sure if our moderators have the time for that (as I already mentioned). But no doubt that this will be the perfect solution to avoid double content and improving the search experience.
Ohhh (no sarcasm), I didnât had any - but perhaps only because I was not very active for years and those I had replied to were probably already closed. I understand that this is very annoying.
I have reopened this one, as there was (somewhat) ongoing discussion.
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do you mean when the topic is open x years ago and not based on the last post x years ago??
Going forward topics will be closed 6 months after the last reply. But if you encounter something that needs to be reopened please let us know and we can reopen it.
This idea has come up several times over the last few months and is something we had talked about implementing. If 6 months doesnât end up being the right amount of time we can always re-evaluate.
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On new topics you can now see the following notification (putting the words from Dana into a picture):
And how are new users / infrequent visitors meant to know this?
Just a heads up, you now have a load of topics that should have been closed but are forever stuck open never to be closed because they have missed the initial 1.5 year pass and arenât marked for an automatic 6 month close.
This is something weâre trying out because weâve discussed it many times and noticed that itâs common enough to attempt to alleviate, and also requested enough to be on the radar for something users want. If it doesnât work out, thatâs fine. If we need to make changes, also fine. If it does work and solves the initial problem, all the better. I fail to see how trying out this settings change will be the end of all things, and hope we can at least give it a bit of a trial before deciding that the forums are just going to go up in flames because people will need to open their own threads.
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It would be nice if the timestamp on a post were not in pale grey, but in black. Then it would be more visible.
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If a post was made long enough ago that itâs stamped with a date rather than a time, let this date be complete rather than partial. Nicest would be if the date format followed the userâs pref as in their Time/Date System Pref.
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why topic open over 1.5 years???
+1, we need an âolympic spiritâ on this. Evaluating the possibilities with the target to improve things. If this is showing not to work out (for whatever technical reason ) , I assume we can always revert back. The âveryâ old posting (from the old forum) have already the challenge that the formatting of code is gone with the wind. No issue for the experienced Xojo developer but very likely a nightmare for beginners âŚ
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Its pointless discussing it at it seems everyoneâs mind is already made up or they simply donât understand what results will come from these actions.
Great job stopping people easily updating out of date code and putting a barrier in their way when that is more needed than ever due to all the recent changes. Great job increasing the fragmentation and dilution of the already thin bits of information on the forum.
All hope abandon ye who enter here
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Youâre not as misunderstood as you think you are. Weâre trying it, if it doesnât work we can go back. Discussion around this sort of thing is great, but it doesnât mean that weâre just going to stop trying to improve things because there might be some issues to work out.