The intention was to clean up the categories a little bit more and avoid old posts from getting revived, that were no longer relevant. I do agree that some posts should not fall into this category and Volunteering is not necessarily for recruitment discussions only, hence to avoid further issues I have removed this auto-close setting from the Volunteering category.
This setting was changed on March 13th. If there are any closed posts you need to me re-open, feel free to let me know!
Now for the post: An out of the blue survey which is on the General category, no such setting for auto-close existed, which is odd. I went ahead and manually removed the auto-closing function from the topic. Let me know if any new posts are popping up with auto-close messages after today to investigate where the setting is coming from and correct it.
Sorry again for this and thank you for tagging me on this one. Keep them coming! 
Cheers,
Mariliam