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Hi all,

Just thought I'd mention something I've noticed since joining this forum

Would it be a good idea to close threads once the initial question that was posted has been answered?

I notice a few posts where people go on and on and as soon as you post a reply to one question they come back at you with another, like here.

Also since this forum seems to mainly be a questions and answers type of forum it's easier to see which questions are still unanswered as marked as an open post, where as questions that have been answered could be marked as closed.

I guess this throws up the discussion on who would actually close the post and what constitutes a solution but I thought it's something I would mention since I've seen it on other forums.

Thoughts?

We always encourage our members to come forward with suggestions for improvements so thank you for your input.

In general we the moderators and administrators do not close thread unless a rule violation has taken place. We generally prefer to leave the threads open so that if another user has a similar question they can post in the original tread, additionally there are too many threads for moderators and/or admins to keep track of, and since only admin and mods have those priveleges.

Personally I can see both the upside and downside of what you have proposed, however I believe it was previously discussed in the moderator forum and the decision was to leave all threads with the exception of sticky and read-only forums open, unless it was to prevent rule violation. With respect to changing the topic in the middle of the thread, general practice is to ask the poster to post in a new thread, due to the change in topic and move on.

I don't think that closing threads en masse is a great idea. Even if a question has been answered, there there may be better solutions and it is quite useful to post those. Or a prosposed solution may look good at first glance, but has problems of its own. There are a lot of good reasons to continue a discusssion even though an apparent answer has been found. And consider the thread you linked... I do not feel that splitting that thread into 10 or 20 threads would improve the forum.

But I don't allow myself to feel trapped in a thread. When I feel that further discussion is pointless, I just move on. I do not feel compelled to answer a second question in a thread just because I answered an earlier question. This attitude provides most of the benefits that would come from actually closing a thread.