Welcome!
How do I start the conversation again?
You don't. You are trying to answer a thread that has been locked for age or inactivity. It cannot be unlocked. You use the "Ask the Community" link at the top of the page. That way you get you help you need fast, and without diluting help the original poster deserves.
Yes, I know there are forums out there that will flame you for starting a new thread. Not here. Believe me, the best way to NOT get help here is to tag an "exact same problem" on to another's thread. That also makes threads harder to work for contributors.
👉🏻 Tips for your contributions answering others' questions:
Mining up old threads here is not at all productive. I have been here a dreadfully long time and know that almost never does an original poster (OP) return weeks or months later to check for new responses. What you seek to do is totally ineffective in this setting, helping neither you nor the long-gone OP.
Another issue is that these are said to be the largest and busiest forum in the world. Scale alone requires some ability to limit size to avoid server slowdowns or massive outages
Coming here from a search engine is a problem. They do not segregate results based on thread dates. When I look for my old posts with web search, all engines return posts as old as 2001, about when I started here, and any date references are hard to see. Best to avoid the search engine entry to these forums,
Here's what works for me and most of the senior contributors: The key is "work the newest posts first." If you want to effectively contribute here, bookmark this forum site map:
Site Map - Apple Community
Find the topic areas where you feel you can best contribute, and use the map to go to the topics' list of threads. Concentrate on the first couple of pages where you find the new questions. That ways you hep the most people.
