Old topics are no longer automatically closed after 1 year

[Clorith]

Previously, any topic visited would be set as closed if it was more than a year old.

Just now I found one where users could still reply (the reply is archived, but the post is left open so as not to mess with any meta data for investigation)

The thread in question is at ​https://wordpress.org/support/topic/remove-title-above-image/?view=all

[netweb]

Here's a bbPress 2.x plugin that should do the trick, might need forking for .org, and or and update and tweak or two for our use case: ​https://github.com/thebrandonallen/bbp-auto-close-topics

[SergeyBiryukov]

This was previously a part of the _geriatric-threads.php plugin. In the ​plugin audit post, it's described as:

Add <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” /> to old closed topics

However, it doesn't look like it actually did that, as the dont_index_me() function was never called in the plugin. Maybe it was called elsewhere? What it actually did was auto-close any topic older than 365 days, but that part was not ported over to the new ​"Old Robots" plugin.

Should old topics be set to noindex? I can see it both ways, however I'd like someone to confirm that it was not an unintended change during the migration.

[macmanx]

We had discussed using noindex before, but never really reached a consensus. A year is not too long in the grand scheme of things, and some topics (like discussions on how to use WordPress) are eternal, so let's not noindex for now and just get the auto-close working. Thanks! :)

[SergeyBiryukov]

For reference, the consensus at the ​community summit was to auto-close topics after 6 months since the last reply, regardless of creation date.

[SergeyBiryukov]

In 5610:

Support Forums: Auto-close topics after 6 months since the last reply.

Fixes #2265.