Right now a new draft has three months to make it to #features before being closed automatically. I have the impression that this time is excessive. One month seems to be enough?
Another possibility is to close topics one month after the last comment (as opposed to one or three months after the topic creation. Maybe this option gets the best of both approaches.
What about 2 weeks since the last comment? This would be enough margin not to stress out anyone, and yet would keep drafts moving before they start growing dust.
We could fine tune as needed after seeing how this time limit combines with Bumping drafts automatically.
Unless someone stops me with a good argument, I will enable “2 weeks since the last comment” tomorrow. Then we can see what happens, and if it doesn’t work we can revert or do something different.
You can see what would be the first topics affected here: Drafts - Bitwish (I have pointed the “discuss” word in the banner to this link, maybe this helps a bit resuming stalled discussions).
Something that I don’t know is whether the new rule will apply to existing and new topics or only the ones created after the new rule. Ideally the new rule would apply to all the topics in Drafts, otherwise it’s going to be confusing.
I’m in agreement that three months is a bit excessive. I feel if we have too many older drafts hanging around then it will give an impression that the site is less active than it really is. Two weeks seems very reasonable to me and we can always revise this if it’s too short. I think if people are really keen for a new feature to be implemented then they will be happy to complete the template and get the request reading professionally.
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I have set the new rule. Turns out it applies only to new drafts created from now one. There is a script to close topics created before, applying the new rule. I have asked if there is a way to simply apply the new rule to previous posts.
In the meantime, I will run the script every now and then, manually (too lazy to investigate a cron job).Hopefully we will clean existing drafts soon, either promoting them to Features or closing them after the two weeks of inactivity.
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Great, thank you! Would you like me to look through existing drafts and close any that are over the two week window already?
No need to do this manually, it is easy to run the script that applies the rule. Also, note that it is 14 days after the last post, not after the creation of the draft.
You can see the topics that are getting close to the 14 day limit here: Drafts - Bitwish
That’s a useful view on the drafts, could be helpful in saving some from death! 