Lock comments on closed issues after some amount of time

Personally, I'd be happy to see comments automatically locked as soon as an issue is closed. The current process is for maintainers to only ever mark an issue as Fixed (barring Special Circumstances^[1]); the issue is automatically marked as Closed by the system after it's marked as fixed "for 2 weeks with no activity". This means that by the time the issue is Closed the active discussion has basically halted. I'm not sure exactly what the functional difference between Fixed and Closed other than (I think) email notifications don't get sent out for Closed issues?

The case against is, of course, that reviving an old issue brings it to the attention of everyone still subscribed to it^[2], which in most cases will be everyone who contributed to the original thread.

All of that said - I've no idea if this is a Webmaster discussion or an Infrastructure one...!

_{[1] "Special Circumstances" being a phrase which is here used to mean "The maintainer wishes to immediately end all discussion of the topic at hand", IMO strengthening the case for disallowing comments on Closed issues.
[2] Not by email, as noted above, but it at least jumps to the top of their "Your Posts" queue.}

Unrelated: Okay whose idea was it for "sub" and "sup" to have a font-size of 100%

@kingandy: sub has a font-size: 0.923em;

IMO we should start with closing comments on issues that are closed state for more than something long like 36 months. We can then see how big of a problem/help that is.

I would say more like 12 months. Or give the issue moderators the ability to close the comments manually.

Case-in-point https://www.drupal.org/node/1022516

@frob I've closed the comments on this particular issue.

Awesome, thanks.

Moving to customizations for review.

I'm torn on this. I know there's a problem with some people wrongly opening closed issues. However, many times I've found a bug, done the cvs/git archeology to understand when/where was introduced, and then comment at the issue where the bug was first committed. It's to let people know the patch contained a flaw, and either point them to a new issue, or to legitimately re-open an issue if the original bug wasn't actually fixed or something. I try to solicit feedback + reviews on a patch to both fix the current bug and preserve the original intention. Clearly, anyone who participated in the initial issue is a key group to get interested in the new patch. I'm sure it's an edge case compared to the frequency that people do it in a frustrating, unhelpful way. But, there are definitely cases where the ability to re-open an issue is a feature, not a bug.

I'm also not sure what "lock comments" actually means in this context. Are we also preventing anyone from editing/updating the issue? Is that still a good idea? If not, it's certainly a backdoor to keep commenting (since all issue updates auto-generate comments).

That said, I agree with greggles (#3) that if we do this, closing everything older than 3 years would be an okay place to start (although the case I describe above has sometimes spanned more than 3 years).

Cheers,
-Derek

@dww, I don't think that is as much an issue now that there is the ability to post related issues. Another helpful, yet more complicated fix, would be to add anther field to the related issue and call it a blame issue. If anything was a blame issue then d.o would automatically comment on the original issue informing all the users that are following that the original issue is being blamed for a new issue. This could happen whether comments are open or closed.

I think comments are okay. Way more frustrating, especially given the issue credit system is #66806: Don't let regular users re-open closed issues