It is impractical to close wiki topics because it’s difficult to give feedback and suggestions to the topics via replies.
A good approach the Discourse Team has come with for wiki topics is to configure the category to:
a) never close the topic
and
b) delete replies after 90 days or so
As a result, people can comment on wiki topics, ask questions, give suggestions, and all that will be gradually incorporated into wiki pages to make them better and more comprehensive.
In the same time, as older comments became handled and irrelevant, they will be deleted automatically.
I’ve also been managing an online community with up to 1M views per month, it has a few wiki-topics categories, and the approach described above proved to work very well.
Generally speaking, you should seek for more interaction and feedback from community, not for less. So while Forum is exactly that place for interaction, it doesn’t make much sense to close topics that naturally trigger discussion and questions.
It’s a good idea to close bug reports once fixed, or Q/A topics once a definitive answer is given.
We don’t get notified when topics are closed. I’ll reopen that one you screenshotted, but next time please just link to it so it’s easier to find (I’m mobile today).
Btw, I wanted to add another option to Caddy2 and json config but I could not because the topic in the Help category was closed, so these auto-closes here and there definitely make for loss of some user input.
We want help topics to be closed, because it’s annoying for users to much later get emails from the forums if someone bumps the topic. Best if you just open a new topic if you have something new to ask.
That’s what the forum is all about. And also, I’d suggest that your assumption is wrong. I personally often would like to keep track of things I care about, and get updates on things when they get resolved many months later.
If I don’t want to receive an update, I can unsubscribe from the topic, OR form the category, OR opt out of email notifications altogether - Discourse is very good at it.
Same goes with the mailing list - if someone is subscribed to a thread, they’ll get updates later even if they occur after many months.
So I’d advise against limiting people interaction in the forum based on guesses like “it would be annoying” etc.
That’s understandable. But as a counterpoint, in our experience, the vast majority of necromancing / topic bumping is either useless “any progress?” posts, or people asking new questions in the replies, rather than starting their own topic (i.e. thread hijacking). Both of these are problematic for various reasons (email/notification annoyance being just one of them). We are trying to keep things organized and easy to search for, and compartmentalized. Long threads that diverge from the original topic are hard to follow.
If you ask me, my opinion on the matter is the following:
That’s the problem of the moderation and curation of information. Flag/delete useless comments and cultivate the culture of not asking about progress.
Bumping topics is actually good - Discourse Meta even has an auto-bump for old topics, so that they are not lost. Topics are closed manually only when it is clear that the problem is not actual any more, or have been solved, or it was about a non-existent feature, etc.
That’s okay, makes life easier for the users who don’t know how to use Discourse. I’dd suggest to make it the mod’s effort to split the topics whenever it happens. Hope it makes sense.
That’s asking us to spend more time that we don’t have. And it’s just frustrating to deal with. We cut away the problem entirely by preventing bumping old threads.
Not to mention that the vast majority of the time those kinds of comments are from new users who don’t understand internet comment etiquette, so “cultivating culture” is moot because it’s from users who we’ve never interacted with before.
I’m just a volunteer. I don’t have the time or energy or mental capacity to deal with more “bad etiquette” comments.
It’s worked for us for years. No reason to change it.
Yeah, I mean, we could do that. Your suggestions are good and honestly I prefer them, but they do add more burden to the very small moderator team. There’s like 4 of us, and 2-3 of them are consistently active. We just need a lot more active helpers.
Thanks for your volunteering @francislavoie, it’s just that such measures limit the growth of the online community and the activity of its members, hence my input.
I explained the reasons to change it above, now twice.
Yes I realize it’s the problem of the lack of mod effort and volunteering, this is true for almost any community. But nonetheless it does not automatically mean that just blocking potential activity in the forum is the solution. It can only work as a temporary workaround (if your intention is to make the end user happy).
I don’t understand what the issue is here? What’s the problem with continuing a topic by starting a new thread and referencing a closed thread? I do it all the time.
