This happens all the time: I search online for an issue I’m having, and I find threads on this community with no answer.
Eventually you give up the search, and perhaps eventually you find the answer yourself.
Being a good community member, I figure, others were having this problem, and I should share my solution - just to find that the topic has been closed, for no other reason, besides the fact that no one posted a solution in time.
I can maybe understand closing issues with an accepted answer - but closing issue with no answer causes the internet to rot.
Posts on this community rank highly in searches whether they have an answer or not, and that is a huge problem - and this bizarre practice of auto closing questions that didn’t get an answer means you’re actively blocking the community from helping this situation.
Please think about that.
I can understand auto-closing issues in certain specific categories, if that helps your team manage their backlog, and based on the idea that “if this bug affects more than one user, we’ll hear about it again”.
But please understand, you are also making the choice to block users from helping users.
@mindplay Not in any particular order or ranking, but just highlighting some of the causes.
TL;DR = The community platform automatically closes inactive threads after a certain period to help keep discussions current and easier to navigate. This also prevents very old or outdated topics from being revived with information that may no longer apply to the current version of Brave.
To make sure issues are still active. They only close after a month or so of activity. Regardless of whether someone replied to help, it means in all of those cases the person experiencing the issue stopped providing details. Nothing to say if updates changed anything or whatever else. But in many, the person stops replying to the people who were trying to help.
Kind of touching on the above, changes happen. Updates often occur, UI looks different, features are added or removed, etc. What was accurate and helpful for one post won’t always be helpful in the other. Why keep old ones active that might be misleading to people?
People tend to “necro” old topics, often ones that have nothing to do with the original topic. This not only is an annoyance to the people who created the topic but also to anyone trying to help.
Relevance, Not all problems are the same cause or solution. This is especially true as updates have been pushed out. If a person had an issue in 2022 that was resolved and now someone has a similar issue in 2025, they aren’t the same thing and should not be combined.
To make it easier to identify current and existing problems
Too many duplicate topics get created. Keeping them open contributes to issues like above. But when posts highlight they aren’t paying attention or aren’t responding, then close. If you ever linger around, you’ll find many of the unanswered and closed topics are from people who ignored a lot of stuff. For example, let’s look over the past few days. One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, etc.
By them creating topics, they flood out newer and unresolved issues. All of the ones I linked as examples are people who said they haven’t gotten their Rewards payment. Every single one of them ignored not only the template but also the many times it’s already been asked and answered. Part of the template that they deleted says:
If you have a payment issue please submit a ticket to us directly.
I bed to differ. It helps make sure people are getting help and gets the focus on the problems occurring now.
I guess in my list I also should have emphasized the many posts of people who decide not only to completely ignore the templates which ask them questions, but they provide no helpful details. It’s time consuming and highly annoying to continue to have to ask questions. For example:
Orkhan talked about Brave having problems watching Twitch in 1440p. They did not provide any details about their OS, which version of Brave they are using, their graphics cards, anything they have tested, clarify if it’s only Twitch or if it happens anywhere, or anything else.
So if I or anyone else were to help them, either people have to make complete assumptions or you now have to waste a bunch of time asking them questions they were already asked.
And to be clear, when they created the topic, it showed like below.
Troubleshooting technical issues is much easier when both the user and support agent practice clear communication. For this reason, we have provided the template below for you to fill out with information about your issue. Please provide as much detail as possible so we can most efficiently resolve your problem.
Delete the any text above the line separator below before posting
Description of the issue: How can this issue be reproduced?
Expected result:
Brave Version( check About Brave):
Additional Information:
When you consider Brave only has like 2-3 people actively helping users here, they have to focus on the posts that provide relevant details and need ways of sorting to things where they can actively get information. And when they revisit posts, they need to be able to see what’s applicable, not have to read through a really old post with 50 people saying 10 different things.
So why would you keep all of these topics open? It just floods people out and makes it harder to help everyone.
If ever decide to be active here as a user, like I am, you’ll get a greater appreciation for all of this. You’d be amazed at how many times I’ll see topics about someone who is having issues like Brave is crashing when I go to ABC Site and then in replies people are like: "how do I index my website or how much BAT can I earn from Rewards? Especially when you see that those “off topic” replies are to things years old.
Okay, but can you do something to ward off or redirect the search engines then?
Because every post via search engine tends to be some older question, often unanswered or, as you point out, with an outdated answer.
Because the thing is, the outdated or unanswered posts are always going to drastically outnumber recent, relevant, answered posts - unfortunately, search engines are not nearly smart enough to know the difference.
I don’t know, I think the Stack Overflow answer to all of these concerns was much more effective than just closing stuff - instead rewarding for no duplicates, enabling trusted contributors to update questions and even update or correct answers, etc.
Simply closing stuff and then leaving it on a growing heap of junk isn’t working - it’s a band aid on most of the problems you listed, and it just comes with it’s own set of new problems.
People are unaware of how helpful search can be which is an issue, it took me some time to figure out how to best use it and when I’m assisting people (as I am attempting to do now ) I point out, that for best results, you can click the Magnifying Glass, then in the Search Field that pops down, click the Filters Icon to the right of it, which then leads to the full search menu here: https://community.brave.app/search you can then change the Sort By: option to Latest Post to find recent issues and/or a plenty of other options that makes SEARCH much better than the default/basic/generic options that automatically load.
I would point out that the issue with Community Search (as well as how other functions of the Community work, such as Topics closing after X amount of time) is NOT Brave’s Fault, that is the Provider of the Community’s fault, which is Discourse (So Brave unfortunately is powerless to fix this, and so is all the other Discourse Communities, as seen here: https://discover.discourse.com/ ).
To touch on other stuff, the main issue, in my experience, is that people need to be Patient BUT Persistant.
There are 100s of new Topics created each day by new members who don’t even bother attempting to use search (or are and again are generally unhelpful) and then leave, doing nothing and expecting someone will reply, well when 20-50 posts are added after you (even more so over the weekend for obvious reasons) and Brave only has a handful (or less) Employees to help out, and there’s only a few others (such as @Saoiray, who is NOT a Brave Employee but is one of the most helpful amazing volunteers, to the point he’s been promoted to Community Ninja status) then it’s easy for post to easily get lost amongst the shuffle, AGAIN, ESPECIALLY when the original poster never comes back to bump the post, keep it active, letting those who COULD support them know, that IT IS STILL AN ISSUE (or is not and/or doesn’t update their post with the Solution).
So again, I would say it’s because people are NOT PERSISTANT ENOUGH. It’s the Impatient people who get the attention and support and then can make this community not as enjoyable to be around. (Helping people is nice, being bitched at for a problem, yknow less so).
Extra Tip: If you don’t like how this Brave Community works, you can always get a GitHub account and check things out over there, e.g. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues
@mindplay Not really. This is because of how search engines work. If you’re not aware, they tend to work by having a “crawler” (kind of like a robot) visit websites across the internet. Brave does this as well but also uses Web Discovery Project where people who opt into it also serve as crawlers.
As they visit websites, they take note of the website headers and some of the content on the pages. It then saves that particular link with those details to be able to be fetched if people search.
When people use searches, it defaults to what it think is the most relevant. This logic usually follows:
The most words matching your search, especially if an exact phrase.
Filter based on region, trying to match best for your location
Links with the most visits = The more popular a web link is, the more it think it might be relevant.
Yes, this is where search engines have ways to narrow down. For example, Search Operators. Or when you do the search, they let you narrow down based on the date:
Correct. Which is why it needs users to be smart enough to know how to use the tools given. A lot of people aren’t using the options to sort based on date, using operators to narrow results, or anything of the sort. Simply just typing in a word or phrase isn’t going to work. Even if it was intelligent, a lot of people still would be leaving out pertinent details like which specific OS or version of Brave, which might have been able to get even more accurate details.
Somehow there are a lot of people who think that if they just type in a word or two, the absolute perfect result will appear. I’m not sure when people’s expectations started thinking that old or irrelevant search results won’t magically appear. But for some reason that is becoming the state of life.
Along with that is also a lot of posts and people who rely on Cunningham’s Law:
Cunningham’s Law states “the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”
With the many more resources out there, especially of those consisting of trolls, bots, or people going with Cunningham’s Law, there’s a lot more misinformation and old results out there. People need to learn how to properly use the tools available to them in order to get accurate information.
For those who don’t, it will be a constant struggle, much like you’re pointing out.
Hope I’m not sounding harsh in that. Just trying to quickly type and be accurate. Sometimes my answers can perceived wrong because of the directness/bluntness, but just trying to be sincere and point out the struggle we (people on the internet) have in general.
Again though, Stack Overflow worked well with search engines - by having fewer (duplicate, outdated, low quality) questions, encouraging users to consolidate, update or remove questions, and so on.
If there’s 20 similar questions and only one with a good answer, people searching the internet have to do all the work, individually.
Whatever, guess I’ll just use Perplexity for Brave searches, let it do the crap work.
@mindplay have you tried Ask Brave? But yeah, as you mentioned, people are leaning more to AI in hopes it can sort through things. Though the prompts we give makes a big difference and hallucination is still a thing.
Regardless, I will tag in @Mattches for your feedback, especially in reference to how you believe Stack Overflow seems to work better with search engines and the frustration you’re expressing in regard to finding relevant topics, especially ones that are still open for discussion.
Personally, if you have an issue with Brave, I would recommend searching in this site first instead of an external search engine. Not only will it give you the best results but you can also easily sort and filter them for more relevant results. You can even select the status of the topics to check against (so you can avoid closed topics if that’s important to you):
) I point out, that for best results, you can click the 
