Uhm… why is this topic not deleted even after 4 years?
Because no topics on our forum ever auto delete?
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Never knew that. But i remember seeing the words "this topic will auto-close 3 months after the last post in one of my old topics 
“close” meaning: normal users are not able to add new comments to the discussion
“delete” meaning: the discussion no longer exists
OGS Development threads will auto-close after 3 months, no threads ever auto-delete, and this specific thread is not in the OGS Development category, and thus did not auto-close after 3 months.
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I disagree @flovo the original necro was fine, the issue is rather people asking questions before doing some basic research (which is pretty much a problem in every online community, and beyond the scope of resolution here)
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I agree with “The original necro was fine”. I left the topic open and hadn’t deleted the post. But while the necro was on topic, the replies to it weren’t. This happens most of the time for ancient topics (> 1 year).
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Discussion is generally not deleted for being too old, since the content could still be useful for others to look at or maybe even resume discussion of.
@flovo, I don’t think this is a good argument for auto-closing threads. I think it was appropriate that @egb asked a follow-up question in a relevant thread, which provides context and information, and might increase the chances of that question reaching the relevant audience.
Just because a reply went off-topic, it does not mean that the original necro should have been forbidden.
We’ve had a similar discussion before
I would prefer to see that even the OGS Development category have the auto-timeout removed. I understand that the motivation to so do is that the website is constantly changing and that feature/bug discussions can quickly become stale. However, at the same time, there are plenty of discussions about features/changes/bugs that still remain relevant even after months of inactivity (e.g., since no relevant changes have occured).
For example:
In this case, a moderator even reopened the discussion of an old OGS development thread
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As you can see, his post is still in the original thread and the thread is still open, but the follow ups are in most cases off topic (as in this case) or just repetitions of what was already said (at least I would expect that for all topics you linked).
Even after opening the last one, nothing relevant happened.
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But if the thread had auto closed itself, as your original split title suggested, then the post never could have been there in the first place
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I guess no one yet had an answer to @egb’s question, but I don’t think that’s a good reason to suggest that @egb never should have posted it there to begin with.
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The post would just be in a new topic.
There:
And yes, I would have spent more time investigating and answering egb, if it would have been a stand-alone question in a new topic.
I know this is the norm on a lot of community forums around the netiverse… but I kinda like the environment here where we group related topics together rather than needing to click through 30 different thread links to find what you’re actually looking for…
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I don’t find anything in topics longer than 30 posts. 
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ctrl+f ? 
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The search function works for the whole forum, so there is no difference between 1 and multiple topics.
the difference is i have 30 highlighted marks on my scroll bar I can quickly scan, rather than 30 threads I need to open new tabs for to see if it happens to be the right one for what I need
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I too like keeping relevant discussion grouped in the same thread.
Earlier, @flovo expressed the preference to automatically close all threads. See: Please lock ALL topics after 3 Months of inactivity
From the subsequent discussion, where I offered the rebuttal that I mentioned earlier, it appears that the more people on the forum prefer to not close old threads simply for being too old.
The difference is whether one finds one relevant thread to read through, or many relevant threads to read through. I find it more convenient to keep relevant discussion together in the same thread.
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