The last time I experienced something like that was probably over a year ago.
If you encounter this type of situation in the future and think the closed topic could provide some additional context to the discussion and whatever issue you’re trying to describe, I can think of at least three different things you could do:
- Use the Forum’s “Reply as linked topic” option to automatically create a link back to the original (closed) topic as the beginning of your new topic and provide some context/continuity.
- Paste a link yourself to the older topic within your new topic/post.
- Ask the Moderators to re-open the older topic (an easy way to do this is to Flag your own topic and select the Something Else option) so that your discussion can be continued there. I don’t know if that’s something they’d do, and it’s probably a case-by-case thing, but I think it seems like a reasonable request.