What are options for old / outdated discussions?

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Richard Millington wrote a blog about outdated discussions last week.

I got me wondering about our support for handling old discussions. I know that for some customers we've auto-closed a discussion after it reached a certain age but I can't find a setting or plugin for that.

Do we have any capability to automate actions that could be used for old inactive discussions?

Comments

  • Vanilla Forums
    Vanilla Forums

    "Author Selector" lets you reassign the author of a discussion. This can be especially useful to give evergreen discussions to your System user to prevent the OP being buried in notifications or deleting it.

    "Necro" adds a tag to older discussions that have been commented in again recently. This highlights the discussion as a "bump" to moderators so they can investigate. The tag goes away after 3+ people have commented.

    We removed the old "archive discussions older than X" feature because it was largely misunderstood and, personally, I think it's a poor practice to lock folks out of commenting on older content.

    Some ideas:

    • Using analytics to cross-reference high-traffic posts with age. That would help community managers hone in on these discussions.
    • Enhancing advanced search to use "last comment date" as a searchable field.
    • Adding a notification (or queue message in Moderation v2) to note discussions that are bumped when they are older than X days.
    • "Flag for KB" option (or reaction) as part of the Knowledge Base for folks with the "Curator" permission. And/or a "Suggest Edit" option for discussions or KB articles.

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