What is the point of “This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.” ?
This seems to be counterproductive to me, can someone explain the reasoning for that?
Hi @Gregor,
Topics are closed 14 days after the last reply, after an answer has been accepted and the question has been marked solved.
The reason for closing a topic after it is answered and solved came from our experience where someone would reply to a (sometimes years old) topic, raising it back up to the top again.
All the people in that original topic would get a notification email that there was a new reply, and almost all of the time the reply was for a different situation or issue than the original topic (which had been solved).
This had two problems, first it made it very unclear to anyone else reading if the original topic had actually been answered or not. There was often a long trail of replies to the original topic that arrived at an answer that the original poster was happy with, but then there was some new poster with a different but similar issue raising some doubt.
The solution is once a topic has been solved for the original poster, then it is marked as solved, and closed after 14 days, to give enough time for everyone else to finish their discussion.
If someone else has a similar issue, then it’s best to start a new discussion, they can link to the old one ideally, but then it’s clear what the situation is, and what the discussion is about, and the original poster who’s issue has been solved is not bothered by someone else’s similar issue.
There are some exceptions to this, and moderators will re-open a closed topic when that makes sense. For example recently there was a very long thread about issues with Victron IP22 chargers made in 2025. I accepted my own answer with the outcome of that from Victron’s perspective, however it was clear that the discussion was not over as people still had to solve their own individual charger situation. So even though there was an accepted answer, the discussion remains open.
If anyone would like to re-open a closed topic, they can report it to a moderator with the request, but in almost all cases it’s better to start a new one and link to the old one.