Create a Help and Support Archive for out of date information

[ian011]

Large numbers of people continue to repost out of date information in Help and Support, presumably after making a search.

Search results continue to return ever larger amounts of out of date information with no warning of its currency or usefulness.

A previous idea to set the default time limit for search results to either six months or one year was overwhelmingly rejected by the community.

Perhaps a Help and Support Archive should be created and threads with out of date information moved into it?

Candidate threads already include those which:

• list old call prices which changed in 2011 or 2012
• tell people to send a message to 2020 to get internet settings
• list old APN data
• claim that calls to CI and IoM are inclusive
• tell members to contact an agent for a VAT receipt
• mention that goodybags cannot be renewed early
• mention prefixes such as 081 and 089 which no longer exist.

On 26 June 2015 the call price for all calls to 084, 087, 09 and 118 numbers will change. At a stroke, that will render obsolete many thousands of threads mentioning the old call prices.

Idea Issue Tracker

[blackfive460]

Supported - but it would be a really mammoth task...

[anth006]

Presumably your idea would mean archived articles wouldn't come up in a general search but could be searched seperately. 

If this would mean more accurate search results then I support it.

[aaronjlaw]

It depends how it could be implemented but it might make sense, to stop old information occurring unexpectedly. 

[leonag]

i like the idea, would helop clear the forums up as well so kudos to you

[essie112mm]

 This is a sensible idea - but as has already been mentioned, it would involve a massive amount of work to comb through the threads and for that reason only I don't think that it will be implemented. But I am supporting it so that giffgaff will at least see if it might be workable.

A compromise might be to create a Help and Support archive sticky with advice about which information is now out of date. 

[scrips49]

I would cetainly support this idea, even if it's been raised and rejected in the past. Information is useless unless its current and up to date. If we keep handing out the same stock answers which will not solve any of the problems then we are wasting time and probably going a long way to losing customers.

Yes it is a major undertaking but necessary I think. It might be better to try and look at ways of making it happen rather than dismissing it as too difficult

Just my twopenneth

[apinkduck]

It's a good idea, and I think it was a good idea before, but often I think ideas end up being categorized as overwhelmingly rejected by the community just because nobody saw it as it was posted at a bad time and pushed away by a flurry of other ideas landing on top of it.

[cps15966]

Hi @ian011 

It is something I have menioned before too and this is fully supported.

We also encourage members to search for the answer but if there is conflicting answers out there then there's no wonder people get frustrated, especially newcomers.

Archiving would be better than deleting, although there is a lot out there that is no use any more and just taking up space of potentially offering incorrect information as stated, maybe even slowing the system down. It's hard to filter good and bad answers so relevance based around newer posts and those with best answers attached too seems logical. With over 7 million posts on gg now, it's bound to have problems and everything everywhere just needs a general housekeeping excercise.

Maybe two KB's, one for current stuff and one for older archived stuff?. I think a 6 month rule for archiving should be looked at. It won't be like they are being deleted so i cannot see that people could complain really.

What i would be tempted to do though is look at what ties in with things, gg seem very good at making changes to one thing, but maybe not thinking about what other things it affects. Things sometimes need stripping back to bare bones so reducing posts and archiving posts makes sense, after all, if it was a computer, you'd always archive and defrag. I don't think it is something the community should really have a say in, i think it should just be done.

Maybe consider how it can tie in with other things too, like a form for a post, asking for make and model of phone (i have suggested before that it becomes mandatory at activation stage) so it always appears if asking for help, all these things assist

As an aside but something else that may be worth looking at is that I find google a better search engine for searching giffgaffs KB than giffgaff's own internal search engine, it's more specific to what you are asking. Sorry for rambling, but i would be happy for this to just happen without consultation and for gg to just tell us its happened.