Can we consider allowing comments on posts after 10 days?

[brian]

We talked about it! The current conclusion is: we have very few problems now, so we’re probably not going to change it. Moderation tends to be a lot of work for very few people when things are not nice, so preserving the niceness will help us keep a health community long-term by not burning mods out.

I think @mattpiz is right about why the current system is nice, so I’m gonna quote him here:

@mattpiz

I mean I’m not against long discussion (I would like to have longer threads than 10 days also for the case you mention, like new activity) but there is a higher chance that the subject of discussion changes (like here) if it stays open too long. I think that’s one of the reasons.

Another I can see is that making people start a new thread after some time of inactivity is a good incentive to summarize what happened before, which helps incoming new people to the discussion.

Keeping threads from going on tangents and having to revive discussions with helpful summaries instead of necrothreading are two great reasons for the system to work the way it does, and a big part of why the feature exists in Discourse in the first place. This is especially true when new progress is made on some issue after weeks or months of silence. Seeing what came before can be extremely helpful in framing the discussion around finding a solution.

Some more analysis:

• The most concerning case for me was “what if beginners are not getting help in Learn?” but it turns out that 18 of the last 20 timed-out requests seem to have been resolved successfully before the deadline. In my overview, I noticed the remainder were people asking follow-up questions which did not get answered or experienced community members asking about advanced topics.
• The Request Feedback category is really vague—is the discussion finished? Is it solved? What criteria are we using to determine this? People also tend to post things that really belong in Show & Tell in here for… reasons? Do they think their work is not good enough, despite being released? We maybe should revisit the motivations behind this category instead of increasing the time limit to allow more vaguely related discussion. And while we’re on this topic, Evan gave an extremely relevant talk about how this could improve, if anyone wants to take a shot at it: The Hard Parts of Open Source
• Show & Tell has a very distinct purpose: “I made this!” It has a tendency to accumulate unrelated discussions, especially for things like conference video releases. It might actually make sense to shorten the time limit here.

So after all that, I don’t see a strong reason to change this. There are other things that maybe need to change instead, which would improve the community more.