threads closed too soon

Start a new thread if the other one is closed. You can add a link to that thread if it has content that you think might help others understand your problem.

Apple locks threads after a certain amount of time. The problem arises that people will add onto threads for years and years, long after the software and hardware have changed. Earlier suggestions are no longer relevant and threads reach an unbearable length to read.

If you wish to contact the hosts about this, you can find an email link in Apple Support Communities Use Agreement - Apple Community

 in my long tenure here I have seen very few posters return weeks or months later to look for new answers to their threads. I suspect bandwidth issues could be at play given there are an estimated 3 million users of the English-language communities alone.

If you come here from a search engine, you will see far too many out of date threads. Search engines are not conducive to effectively helping here.

The effective way to help here: 

—Bookmark this forum site map: Site Map - Apple Community

—Choose topic areas from the site map where you feel you can best help. 

—Use the site map’s topic links to go directly to those topics.

—Work the first few pages with the newest posts. 

That gives posters the most current information, and they can recognize your contributions with an upvote.

Many posters never make a second post and for all we know may not even have read what we posted already. Fewer will actually post what was a solution for them. One could try asking but I kind of suspect you would never get an answer, particularly if the thread was abandoned many months ago. You usually have to go with what contributors have posted as suggestions.

Your strategy depends upon what you wish to accomplish here. If you simply want to keep up to date on issues, bookmark the forums that interest you and browse. Some are slow moving and will only see a few new posts per day. Some may see a hundred. I have a new computer with a different system on it so I follow the Mac model forum for the model I have, and the system forum for the system version I use. Of course for many threads I don't get beyond the title on the list, but some catch my eye and I read those.

Some people are here to contribute as well. If you have expertise in a forum, bookmark that forum and look for questions you can answer.

As noted earlier, you can also find links to old posts using a web search, but again note their dates. Anything older than 4 or 5 years may truly be out of date. That one reason why Apple locks the threads after a while. It doesn't help if somebody asked a question about hard drive formatting in 2005 and somebody asks a followup question based on replies posted in 2005 about formatting the drive on their 2025 Mac 20 years later. If somebody on a car forum asked about poor fuel supply on their 1980 car and you added to their thread talking about dirty fuel injectors then it would not be contributing anything since back then cars had carburetors. A reader like yourself who did not know that might be confused when trying to follow the thread across 40 years of technology change.

Keeping related discussions together? While an admirable goal, that’s just not going to happen.

Why not? Some folks don’t even read the thread they are replying to for that matter, with the answer alternating repeated postings of the same question. In other threads, wildly unrelated questions with the only common factor being that both might involve, say, an iPhone 14, are also commonplace. Similarly, MacBook Pro questions routinely land in the Mac Pro forum, too. Other people and other topics can absolutely stay together in some threads, and those threads can stay active and unlocked for years.

Please don’t assume that a question more than a few years old is even relevant, or that many of the folks reading the old thread might understand that the tech changes. If you’re sure the question is related to an old thread, then start a new thread, post your question, and link to the old (closed) thread.

Older threads also tend to be spam magnets. There are folks that will look for sorta-related questions to obscure posting their intended spam links, for instance.

Is it chaotic? Sure. That’s a description befitting pretty much the entirety of the internet. Much of humanity, too. Search engines and AI generated text aren’t helping things lately, either.

Got a better idea of how this should all be organized, and ways to better account for how people will use or abuse it, by all means send it to Apple.

Click on your avatar at the top right, then My Subscriptions. Note that last week My Subscriptions was broken but it has been working for the past few days again.

Yes, for older posts you may have to resort to a search, maybe even with a third party one such as Google. It won't find them all though. I bookmark ones that I might want to see again 10 years from now.

Reddit does things their way and Apple does things Apple's way. If you truly wish to comment about this to somebody who can actually do something about it then email the moderators using the ways in the link at the bottom of each support forum page.

People will stop replying if they have no additional suggestions to make, or if they think a user is not trying the things they are suggesting. Remember, we are not Apple. We are users just like yourself who are spending their own free time helping other users. We do not have to reply at all. I know sometimes I may have a suggestion but that's the extent of my knowledge. I may also have something else happening here at home and that takes priority.