Hi Shane, and thanks for your response.
It's your site, and your rules stand. I have no idea whatsoever about what is involved in running such a site. It seems to me that expecting yourself to monitor all traffic is an administrative task of unreasonably enormous proportions bordering on the impossible. Nevertheless, I would offer the following.
I regularly respond to threads many years old. Up until 2005 I was using Windows 98SE, from which I moved to XP. So you can see that answers to any questions posed would likely go back many years. And they did. Further, I am a fiddler, a messer abouter, a hobbyist. I have boxes of bits containing old stuff that every now and then ignite my interest, and necessitate searches for advice. For instance: a real recent example.
I have several old internal DVD drives, all dated 2004. I needed to know the capabilities of each - I was having problems with one of them. A search for information for a particular model initially proved fruitless. I persevered. During the course of my lengthy search I came across others seeking the same information, with the same (lack of) success. Some of these threads were very, very old. E v e n t u a l l y, after much time I discovered that that model was more readily known to the industry by a different name and number. I then quickly located the manual and got the information I wanted. I was then able to go back to those unsolved threads and post this new revealing information - only to those that weren't closed, of course. I posted this new information not necessarily to inform the original poster of the question - who had likely given up and moved on, but to ensure that the information was available, via the work of the same spiders that directed me to those threads and presented them in my browser, to anyone else seeking the same information in the future. Information never dies. There are still millions of people using Windows 98SE, and, of course, 98 and 95; and maybe there exists in a city-forest somewhere a tribe that communicates exclusively using DOS - which is just like Linux but with different commands.
You choose to use time as the endpoint. Logically this is clearly wrong. (Here I must state that I acknowledge your right to do with your site as you wish, without judgement - seriously.) But the only true closure for any thread of any age can only be solution. If the thread is not solved then it remains open in actual fact regardless of administrative requirements or actions.
Closed threads to which I could supply useful information make me feel disappointed. I suspect, though, that if contributors discovered that their closed threads could have, by remaining open, provided them with solutions, would be more than a titchy bit annoyed.
Just saying. Good site. Don't hate me. I'd like to stick around.
