Why does Apple Community close off questions with no new answers?!

There are threads on here that are almost 20 years old. Advice provided for doing something 20 years ago, or even 2 years ago, may not be relevant for today's machines. It may be tricky for people to follow reasoning if they didn't notice a jump in chronology between recommendations.

It may also help keep threads short and again easier to follow. If we had a 15 year old thread about problems downloading something from the iTunes Store, it might be several thousand posts long by now. ;-)

Uh, Stack Exchange when I visit it seems to have a different level user than many of the people posting here. I agree it is a good forum with some replies but the things I see there read more like what used to be posted here in the early 2000s by more technically experienced users. ;-) As you say, it is a software engineers haven, but here we have a lot of posts from everyday users who may even have problems understanding the basics. There's a need for both styles of forum.

Welcome!

You are asking the community "why" when you should asking Apple. People who respond here are end users like you; the Mods won't answer this here.

Should you wish to contact the Moderation Team, their contact information is listed several times in the Use Agreement we all agreed to follow on joining here. While there, note section B.1 in case this thread is removed.

I've been here a dreadfully long time. My observation is the the number of people who return weeks or months latter to check for a response to a thread is miniscule.

Unanswered questions happen for any number of reasons. In 22+ years here I've seen my share of questions where simply not enough information is furnished by the original poster to work with. Posts with useful details about the problem get attention. Posts lacking details may get skipped over. Frankly, constantly typing "You have not provided us enough information for us to begin helping in this setting where we can neither see nor touch your devices..." gets old.

When I started, there were about 100 active responders who do this every day. Although the community has grown to an estimated 3 million users, the cadre of committed volunteer responders is about the same size. That means each of us potentially has to service 30,000 users!

We'd be glad to have your help, but realize this has never been at the tech level of forums like Stack Exchange. Questions asked of ASC tends to be very basic, including from people who cannot find the power button 😳

I hope you stay and help us with the workload.

AJ