Testing a new Archive tag for older/mega threads

prescilla_g

Good morning folks,

We’ve been thinking about how best to make sure our forums are best kept tidy and clean for everybody, particularly in light of our recent mega threads issue (https://community.giffgaff.com/d/33078757-unexpected-behavior-with-mega-threads). Our forum holds a lot of historical information, some of which may not be relevant today. We want to make sure that the information we are serving up to our members is accurate and relevant but at the same time, we want to make sure our historical content is also easily accessible.

We came up with an idea to try and help with this; by creating a master Archive, we would then use secondary tags (e.g Gameplan discussions, General Discussion) to tidy away old forums or threads.You would only be able to access this area of the forum by being signed in, so information residing within here would not be searchable on Google. This means that our forum content that does end up on Google is relevant and accurate, making it a better experience for members looking for help and information.

To start us off, we thought we could move the 3 gameplan archives we have into this new Archive tag as well as all the closed mega threads. This way we can monitor if there will be any unforeseen impact to the smooth running of our platform before we start moving more in. All of those would be moved over as secondary tags so they will be easily filtered if need be.

This will be the first of hopefully many more experiments and of course, we would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this. We are always trying to find a better way and there’s always plenty more we can do to make our community the best that it can be for everyone 🙂

Have a great day,
Prescilla

shabazmoqsud

prescilla_g this will be great the forum and sections will be more organised

bluemoonbaz

prescilla_g
That's a great idea , starting with 3 gameplan archives and moving on to the very old content that needs storing.
As you say this will make sure people seaching for help will get a more up to date version and a better experience.
But at the same time we can still access the old stuff if needed

m0dcm

prescilla_g Superb idea, nothing like keeping the community running ship shape and smoothly!
Cheers for keeping us all in the loop!

Dave
"Survived brain surgery Friday 13th March... Now resting at home 😉"

bill48er

Hi prescilla_g this is a long over due move - 👍️ 👍️ from me.

blackfive460

prescilla_g

You've only mentioned Gameplan and GD but I wonder if the same could be done more usefully with Help & Support?

There's an awful lot of old, now wrong and other out of date information in there that I've seen come up in Google searches.

Perhaps a rolling 12 or 18 month cut off then threads are archived might help to remove a great deal of out of date and now unnecessary threads.

harrrrrry

prescilla_g You would only be able to access this area of the forum by being signed in, so information residing within here would not be searchable on Google.

This seems well thought out, especially if the search on giffgaff will exclude those posts (by default) and then offer to optionally repeat the search on the archived items.

blackfive460 Perhaps a rolling 12 or 18 month cut off then threads are archived might help to remove a great deal of out of date and now unnecessary threads.

I'd say (initially) 24 months for help threads with a best answer and 3 months for help threads without a best answer. As time goes on, we can improve these figures up or down according to experience. We can also report any thread containing obsolete information, regardless of age and BA status, to have the tag added if appropriate.

shabazmoqsud the new platform section n tag needs to be merged with feedback as its not needed anymore

Agreed in principle, but anything that's older than the date the "new" platform opened should be given the same obsolete tag treatment as above. Much of it is planning and speculation so there's little point in merge it with considering it as feedback.

mrjeeves

prescilla_g

Woohoo! This sounds mildly similar to my old suggestion from late last year: https://community.giffgaff.com/d/33030722-auto-lock-old-inactive-threads

I still feel like there should be a set system for threads as to when they should be moved, like this flowchart:

Of course, this would also have to be updated to exclude stickied threads, etc. but overall this seems fantastic and something that would have been a lot harder back on Lithium, for sure!

sha_shah1

prescilla_g
Great idea i am sure it will be very usefull.

orangeman33

prescilla_g I think moving forward this is a fantastic idea. Would giffgaff consider using this idea across all forums?

richybhoy36

prescilla_g Hi there this sounds like a good idea to me and if it's going to make giffgaff better then I'm all for it .:-)

endorphin

prescilla_g yes I'm all for tidying away vintage threads, there's no point in having them around especially if they have not been viewed or posted to for x number of days. This especially applies to the Help forum where vintage responses and Best Answers are seriously out of date considering the number of changes that have happened in the meantime.

dtuxcomp

prescilla_g As two of my long standing threads have been locked due to being megathreads I would like to see something along these lines put in place, I happily restarted both and left links in the OP's to each of the original threads, but last time I checked those links weren't working any more, so if all the archived threads were put into a logical place and not moved again it would make life easier when linking to them.

georgecooksey24

prescilla_g this will be a great feature thanks

dtuxcomp

m0dcm You picked a great time to have surgery didn't you, great to hear it all went ok mate 🙂

shabazmoqsud

@prescilla_g another thing that needs to be done is the new platform section n tag needs to ve merged with feedback as its not needed anymore

many members have mentioned this previously.

suppers_ready

Perhaps I've been here too long, but I'm not sure I would agree to consigning giffgaff history to an archive. Listening, fish and chips, old friends and the spirit that created the giffgaff community.

What's wrong with fixing the mega thread issue? Having a new thread for a week isn't a proper solution imho, just an easier one.

I agree with blackfive460, if you apply the argument to Help and Support it makes sense, otherwise less so (apart from gameplan obviously)

blackfive460

suppers_ready Perhaps I've been here too long, but I'm not sure I would agree to consigning giffgaff history to an archive. Listening, fish and chips, old friends and the spirit that created the giffgaff community.

Maybe archiving is only appropriate for some sections?

When I made my previous post I was only thinking along the lines of hiding out of date material from Google and other search engines and I agree that it would be a shame to hide away in an archive some of those threads and well respected names from the 'good old days'.

@prescilla_g Perhaps the whole idea of fixing this issue that seems to only affect GD by archiving needs a rethink?

As a complete aside, what has happened to the archived old Ideas Board? Any link to that just takes me to the Lab front page. The old Ideas Board was somewhere that I and many others spent a great deal of time and effort on so I really hope that we haven't permanently lost all that material.

Perhaps I've been here too long too...

dtuxcomp

suppers_ready Very good points, with H&S it really does make sense, I would rather not have to keep re-starting my longer running threads, so a fix is needed for megathreads still.

harrrrrry

orangeman33 Would giffgaff consider using this idea across all forums?

It should especially be considered for announcements. And especially for individual service updates, which should be archived as soon as the problem is resolved.

It would also very seriously help if announcements and service updates were read only, with only staff being able to add to them. If discussion is needed in addition to the announcement, it should be somewhere else. No other forum makes staff replies so difficult to find because announcements are polluted by comment that would be better elsewhere.

orangeman33

harrrrrry Yes, I agree with you there. Possibly a thread like the payback thread for each month.

prescilla_g

Good morning folks,

Thanks so much for taking the time to get up to speed with this - it's great to see that you're enthusiastic about this test 🙂

We're starting small and simple to begin with, just to test and make sure the initial move works well for all of us. I think we all know that one wrong move or piece of code can very quickly make our forums a bad experience and that's something we definitely don't want!

I've listed and will continue to list all of your brilliant suggestions and taking it to the office based team who will be able to see and plan what we could possibly put in the pipeline for development. For now, the focus will be ensuring this test goes as well and as smoothly as possible.

The power of tags is something that even we, as a team, are learning we can utilise and do some amazing things with it for our community.

Thanks so much everyone and if you have any more thoughts, do feel free to share here.

Stay safe and take care
Prescilla

richybhoy36

prescilla_g Thank you for keeping us up to date with everything ! :-)