Hey Chris,
Really great question! What we’ve found over the years is that responding to topics older than about 60-90 days, has a very low rate of return for the original poster (and/or the other commentors) to reply to the person reviving the conversation. At best, there’s a reply and a “we’re way past that problem now”.
What we’ve found works really well is closing the topic after 60 days, and all you have to do to revive the conversation is simply create a new topic and reference the old topic in your post, and just share the link so it unfurls like this:
We found that this has much higher rate of success for that person!