Why are Certain Forums and Topics suddenly scheduled for deletion?

[GarthElliott-2]

As for the timeframe, I'd prefer to get a warning 14 days, advising me that I have inactive treads on my forum. Then at 7 days, get a warning that inactive threads will be removed. Then a final warning 2 days before they are deleted.

I'm not too happy about having forum threads deleted. Wouldn't it be better to simply have an Archive function, rather than deleting inactive posts.? Some of the threads on my forum are sticky's and are therefor not active. I wouldn't want them to be deleted. And just because a particular thread on the forum isn't 'active', doesn't mean people don't read it.

[Franklin <Nabble>]

The way it works is that if there is any activity (meaning views) in the forum, then all threads in that forums are safe.  Only the top node (the forum) is checked for deletion.  If your entire forum is inactive, then you can still keep it by saying that you don't want it deleted every 3 months when you get the notice.  And even if the forum is deleted, the threads inside the forums are not deleted.  What happens is that after the forum is deleted, these threads become top level independent nodes and then they subject to the same deletion process after 3 months.  So if a forum owner allows his forum to be deleted, thread starters can still save their threads.  Does this process make sense?

[Franklin <Nabble>]

Cath wrote

Thanks. I tried that and didn't get an error message, but the post I moved hasn't reappeared in the existing thread. Perhaps it needs time to work through.

Is this post now in the forum?  If you want to move it under an existing thread, then just move this post to the permalink of a post in the target thread.

[Cath-2]

CONTENTS DELETED

The author has deleted this message.

[Franklin <Nabble>]

I agree with you.  I hope you can manage things manually for a few months until we get a good solution in place.

[Graham Perrin]

Franklin Schmidt <Nabble> wrote

Thanks for the feedback.  If 7 days is too short, what do you recommend?  

At least a month; see <http://n2.nabble.com/-tp4131246p4131518.html> for details.

Realistically, you'll have some content owners who don't act in response to all three notices (one month, one week, one day) then eventually complain that they can't find their content. I have seen people behave in this way countless times ;) In such situations you can place the blame with the user, true, but that doesn't help the situation — and like it or not, users do not learn from such mistakes — all in all, it creates an air of negativity and dissatisfaction.

People are generally passive, so if we wait for people to expressly agree before deleting stuff, we will never delete anything.

How much do you expect to save by deletion?

Hugo <Nabble> wrote

We can export to XML right now, but this isn't easily imported by other forum software. We may work on this in the future.

Suggestions

Don't allow the system to delete content unless the owner expressly OK's the deletion.

Find a complementary way of drawing attention to potential garbage. Maybe a banner that appears once per day, or once per browsing session, until the owner says 'delete' or 'do not delete' at each item.

If you must delete content without the intervention of the owner, then export it to XML and e-mail it to the owner.

Thanks for consideration!
Graham

[i8n]

Back to the original problem I raised at the start of this thread (albeit with us now realising what has happened thanks to some work by Cath)

1.  A user has deleted their account, which has then in turn "orphaned" replies to their posts/topics.
2.  Those people with orphaned posts then get 7 days to do something about it (which is too short and I like the suggestion from Graham on what to use in future)

So for now we've managed to move a couple of posts and Cath will look to sort the others out.  There is however a problem in that even as the forum owner, I cannot take care of these posts myself - I just don't get the option to move the post unless I actually wrote that post.

It would be helpful to be able to do this as the forum owner, because as Cath mentioned above, most of our users will not be able to sort this out for themselves, and so I'd rather be able to have some form of option as the forum owner to be able to take care of all these orphaned posts.

Cheers

Ian

[Franklin <Nabble>]

Okay, I can see that a lot of people are upset about the issue of orphaned posts, so we are going to come up with something.  Please give us a week to figure this out.

[i8n]

Thanks Franklin and Hugo.

We look forward to your thoughts!

Ian

[Franklin <Nabble>]

This thread now has 2 topics in it, about orphaned threads and about deleting forums.  About deleting forums:

We have a lot of people who come in and create test forums.  This is just junk that clutters up our system.  We want to get rid of it.  We also want to delete abandoned forums.  We don't have a budget like Google's, so we don't want to waste resources on stuff that no one cares about.  The savings for us is significant.

We can extend the time period but I don't see much point to multiple messages.  The benefit of extending the time period is for someone who is on vacation and may not be available to respond.  But one email should be enough, plus the message that shows at the top of the forum.  So should we extend the time period to 30 days?

Graham Perrin wrote

Don't allow the system to delete content unless the owner expressly OK's the deletion.

Then almost nothing would be deleted because most people will do nothing.

Find a complementary way of drawing attention to potential garbage. Maybe a banner that appears once per day, or once per browsing session, until the owner says 'delete' or 'do not delete' at each item.

We already have a persistent warning that appears at the top of the forum for the owner.  The problem is that most of these forums really are abandoned, so the owner will never see it.

If you must delete content without the intervention of the owner, then export it to XML and e-mail it to the owner.

In some cases, this could be a big file (like for an abandoned mailing list archive) and people would surely complain about this.  Even small attachments are viewed as risky (probably a virus).  But really, I don't understand the need for this.  Why is it so hard for a forum owner to just click 2 links every 3 months?

At some point, we will show ads on Nabble and let users pay for ad-free forums.  We will not delete these ad-free forums (as long as the owner keeps paying).  So this does solve the problem.  It seems fair that we shouldn't have to pay to support an inactive forum that does nothing for us.

[GarthElliott]

Franklin Schmidt <Nabble> wrote

At some point, we will show ads on Nabble and let users pay for ad-free forums.

One of the reason why I choose Nabble was because:
a. It's free
b. There are no goddamn stupid ads that are unrelated to my forum

If Nabble forces these ads onto my forum and expect me to pay to have an ad-free forum, I'll be looking at another solution, closing my Nabble account.

[Franklin <Nabble>]

So what do you suggest we do to make money?

We will also eventually allow you to install Nabble and run it for free, but Nabble uses Java and we have no reason to work on making the installation easy (since most people are not going to install a Java app on a web server), so this will cost you time and effort.

[GarthElliott]

My forum doesn't attract that much traffic to warrant the expense of a paid forum. And I don't want ads on my website that promotes products/services that are completely unrelated to the topic of my forum.

Thanks for putting it out there that Nabble will start putting ads onto forums. This forewarning gives me time to research alternative options.

[Franklin <Nabble>]

The cost of ad-free would be based on traffic, so if you have little traffic, it would only cost a few dollars.  Is this unreasonable?

[Franklin <Nabble>]

We have removed the option to delete posts.  Users can just edit a post to delete the content.  When a user deleted his account, all of his posts have the content changed to "deleted".  I think this should solve the problem.

[i8n]

Thanks Franklin.

So if I understand you correctly, a users posts are now never deleted.  When an account is deleted their posts stay there (along with all replies etc.) but the content of what they wrote only is replaced with the phrase "deleted".

Hence subsequent replies to that post are left intact with no changes.

I think that should do nicely from our point of view, so thanks again for taking this point onboard.

Ian

[Franklin <Nabble>]

Yes that's correct.

[Graham Perrin]

Graham Perrin wrote

The intention is great, but the implementation doesn't feel good.

The implementation is alarmingly aggressive, and targeting some things that must not be targeted.

In the screen shot below, a perfectly good parent forum was scheduled for deletion when the child was used very recently — 7 December.



Re <http://n2.nabble.com/-tp4194806p4199494.html> <http://n2.nabble.com/-tp4184071p4199503.html> I do want a holiday without checking e-mail for inappropriate deletions and I don't want to recreate lost parents!

Please, please, stop these deletions until something more agreeable is in place.

Thanks.

[Graham Perrin]

Franklin Schmidt <Nabble> wrote

We have a lot of people who come in and create test forums.  This is just junk

I realise that tempers are running high but I have to say, that's a careless approach.

NOT all junk!

Please consider that people may plan to review those test forums at a later date. A much later date. After, say, some things from the wish list have been implemented.

If I said that Nabble's tests were junk, how would Nabble developers feel?

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Graham Perrin wrote

I realise that tempers are running high but I have to say, that's a careless approach.

We are adjusting the feature to minimize the problems.

Graham Perrin wrote

Please consider that people may plan to review those test forums at a later date. A much later date. After, say, some things from the wish list have been implemented.

People can save test forums by following the instructions in the email. Also, test forums usually take less than 5 minutes to create (i.e., most test forums have one or two posts only). So it would be easy to re-create them again at a later point.