How to reopen a closed question on Apple Support Community?

1. Start a new thread containing your current issue description and reference the old closed thread if you want to include that old discussion.
2. Bonus answer: No.

The board staff set the software to lock threads that have been inactive for long enough. Create another one and link to the first.

(261259)

2 things:

1* What if someone elses symptoms happen to you more than a year after and the entire thread or most of it is relevant?

2 Funny thing, this just happened to me, the thread I have received the following message on … - Apple Community was relevant to me, though it didn't give me an explanation of what could have caused the issue and I needed to ask follow up questions and there was no way to reopen the issue.

Bonus question: This isn't just to keep an internal metric of number of open issues down is it?