Questions on Communities

It doesn’t matter if the question has been answered or not; there is a timeline on when it will “disappear” into the archive - I am not sure how long that is, but I believe it is about 6 months. And, since the search function here simply does not work well, you can still find it by googling for it.

There has to be some sort of timeline since there are more than 3 million users here worldwide; another reason is that technology changes so quickly that an answer tailored to a specific device and/or OS version may be irrelevant after a few months or a year because the new model or OS version has different features and/or behaves differently.

The action involved in what babowa mentions is that the post will be visible and, sometimes, searchable via the forums, but will be locked so no others can add comments to what is considered a dead thread.

The overarching reason for leaving posts up is that are available for researching old issues. As these forums cover Apple products back to the Apple ][. I look up old posts all the time when helping with older computer models.

Allan Jones wrote:

The action involved in what babowa mentions is that the post will be visible and, sometimes, searchable via the forums, but will be locked so no others can add comments to what is considered a dead thread.

The overarching reason for leaving posts up is that are available for researching old issues. As these forums cover Apple products back to the Apple ][. I look up old posts all the time when helping with older computer models.

Yes, I've seen many very old posts when searching to get help with a problem before starting a new thread. I've found it useful to filter by date to get to the more recent posts (in most cases not relevant to be looking at a 2015 post for a problem with iphone on current iOS)

it remains for ever, even if somebody answers it stay there

Not sure what you mean or why your asking