User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Introducing New Moderator Opportunities For Community Administration/@comment-1738746-20160116043732/@comment-452-20160116183316

"(if moderators are doing their job correctly, all open topics are active ones)"

You are making the assumption that "All forum topics should be eventually closed", which is not universal, nor should it be. The entire concept of "This thread is too old, you're not allowed to post in it" is unwelcoming and anti-community.

If someone has a related question about something in said a thread, they should be encouraged to post in the existing thread so that anyone else finding the original thread can also read the related question and answer.

However, I agree that the forum system - especially here on Community Central - really needs a way to find unanswered questions, and that it would be nice if the thread poster (or moderator) could flag their question as "resolved".

Requiring posters/moderators to manually flag all threads as resolved would create too much workload - but having an optional "Still needs help" flag which could only be set after the first 24 hours would be one way to achieve it.

This could currently be achieved through the use of a category,, the problem being that users would need to be informed of the category, and the category would list ugly URLs like "".
 * edit: Or not, apparently categories in Threads are completely ignored.