What does it take to get a topic closed?

Colour me curious. There was a plea on here for information about showboat for a class project on here recently. In general, usually these are last minute, help me write my paper pleas, but even these kinds of things can spark interesting discussions. Within a few hours the discussion was closed. First, I don't post here very often, so its a bit of a surprise that discussion threads can be closed. I often see things you'd think were dead get recycled. Second, what are the qualifications used to close a thread? When is a discussion over? When nobody has posted to it for awhie, when whomever that has the keys to the discussion lists decides that the discussion no longer has any merit? I'm just curious since that one ended rather quickly and I'm not at all sure why. Was it because it didn't have merit? Was it because it was off topic?

Combine one teaspoon of zero-day-old account, a tablespoon of absolutely irrelevant posting, and two heaping cups of an obvious "do my homework for me" plea. Bake at 350 for one hour, and you've got yourself a tasty recipe for a closed thread.

I guess. Although you can look at it this way.

a. it was in newbie introductions. so zero-day-old account would be plausable.

b. irrelevant is subjective, esp. when you're talking about a forum that has a thread that involves whether or not dopey was the best of the 7 dwarfs. personally i think musical origin or meaning has more to do with fruvous, but thats just me.

c. i see no real difference betwen "do my homework for me" pleas and people who ask for job hunting help or other tips. if people want to help, let them help, if they don't, then they won't.

its not something i feel all that passionately about, but i guess i found it pretty arbitrary. if people didn't want to post to it, they could have just let it die, like other threads. of course, i could have covered this in a private message but not knowing who closed it and who has the power to close threads led me to ask about the policy.