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Thanks for your responses, but the maturity of 3 months seems more like a symptom of frustration than something which was debated among the forum members and collectively arrived at.
In addition, it is impossible to rate closed threads, which was originally a feature to improve Google rankings of threads. So with the 3-month-rule we are compromising the ability to improve threads in 2 ways.

As I recall, the decision to close threads after three months was made after discussions within the forum advisory team, which is a fairly large user group.

Are you requesting that this team revisit this decision?

---------- Post updated at 20:47 ---------- Previous update was at 12:29 ----------

I just checked, and I did not have any trouble at all rating a closed thread.

Our thinking is that if you want to reference a thread that is closed, simply start a new thread and cut-and-paste the reference thread and start a new one

Neo, that's possibly not a valid test, as an admin you can also reply to closed threads.

I am now just a registered user. When I try to rate a closed thread I get "error on page".

Users not being able to rate closed threads is a problem that we should try to address as long as there are such things as "closed threads". Closed threads need to work correctly. I not sure that the rating problem is strong argument against closing threads 3 months old. We need a better fix.

If a thread has been open for three months without an answer, it seems a little unlikely that answer is forthcoming. And the fact that the thread was closed unanswered is an invitation to post the question again. Anyone posting a question for the second time should try to add some more details or something like that. The particular case of closing an unanswered 3-month old question does not worry me very much.

The general question of whether or not to close old threads has arguments on both sides. But if you really want to respond to an old thread, you can start a new thread with a link to the old thread. That is almost the same thing or at least a workable substitute.

After poking around the net, it appears that users not being able to rate closed threads is a "feature" of vBulletin.

To change it we would need to mod the code base. I don't see any compelling reasons why users should not be able to rate closed threads. Just the opposite, I think rating closed threads is important.

I want to thank figaro for taking the time to point this out

---------- Post updated at 02:02 ---------- Previous update was at 01:38 ----------

OK, I think I fixed the error (there was an error in the template).

However, there is still the rating issue to consider...

---------- Post updated at 02:17 ---------- Previous update was at 02:02 ----------

OK, as a temporary fix (I don't see any major issues, please let me know if you do), I commented out the part of threadrate.php that checks to see if the thread is closed and throws an error if it is closed.

I checked as a registered user (not admin) and was able to rate a thread.

---------- Post updated at 02:32 ---------- Previous update was at 02:17 ----------

Actually, I don't recall the issue being of "frustration" as much as the desire by the advisory team for users to start new threads (and reference old ones) versus replying to old stale threads and zombies.

Basically, I think the concensus was, that for older threads, a poster should start a new thread and simply cut-and-paste a link back to reference that thread, if they wish.

PS: Please note that I think I have fixed the "rating closed thread issue" and you should be able to rate closed threads now.

Have we addressed your concerns? Are you OK with where we are now with your original post?

I just rated a closed thread.