Why are Certain Forums and Topics suddenly scheduled for deletion?

[Graham Perrin]

Hugo <Nabble> wrote

We are adjusting the feature to minimize the problems.

Thanks :)

… usually take less than 5 minutes to create … easy to re-create

I'm more concerned about the less usual cases, the things that may be not easy to re-create.

(Most concerned about the targeting for deletion of roots, where children are recently active.)

Re <http://n2.nabble.com/-tp4131246p4147621.html> could an XML export be easily re-imported to Nabble, to include all options (type, structure, pinning etc.) previously associated with a forum? In particular: can the original URL be restored?

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Graham Perrin wrote

I'm more concerned about the less usual cases, the things that may be not easy to re-create.
(Most concerned about the targeting for deletion of roots, where children are recently active.)

This is not going to happen again. Let me explain what happened:
We measure activity based on the number of visits a forum (or gallery, blog, etc.) receives. Any visit increases the activity of the structure, independently of what is being visited (the forum itself, a topic, a post, etc.). So if you visit a post, you tell Nabble that your forum is active. If none of your nodes receive visits, then activity will reach zero after a certain period of time.

That mailing list archive was scheduled for deletion because it had very few visits (see the number of visits in your snapshot). But I agree with you that recent posts should prevent scheduling for deletion. We are discussing this internally, so we will find a solution soon. I myself have mailing list archives that I don't visit ofter and I don't want them to be removed.

Graham Perrin wrote

Re <http://n2.nabble.com/-tp4131246p4147621.html> could an XML export be easily re-imported to Nabble, to include all options (type, structure, pinning etc.) previously associated with a forum? In particular: can the original URL be restored?

The XML backup will be available in the next release. It contains all the information needed to fully restore a forum (or blog, gallery, etc.), except that the URL won't be the same.

[Graham Perrin]

Sorry, but I still find this deletion feature incredibly ugly. A stain on a service that's otherwise excellent in so many ways.

I'm coming to the end of an incredibly busy few months where I haven't had time to wade through mountains of e-mail. The fourteen days is way, way, way too short.

Requiring the user/administrator to plough through e-mail for a service that is essentially web-based goes strongly against the grain. I'm trying to move away from e-mail, towards using the web for things. That's why I liked Nabble.

At the very least, please make the warnings visible to the user WITHIN Nabble — do not require the user to STEP AWAY from Nabble to maintain it! (AFAIR that suggestion was made previously.)

The answer <http://n2.nabble.com/help/Answer.jtp?id=53> doesn't make the feature any less annoying.

Thanks for your consideration.

[Hugo <Nabble>]

We do plan to make things less annoying and more visible, but we are working on a very important feature (templates and modules) and Nabble has only two developers. So we can't work on everything and we must follow our priorities. The idea is to improve the deletion mechanism after finishing those top priority features (hopefully in a few months), mainly because people get warned by email. How often do you check your inbox?

[dandv]

I've been using Nabble to archive many mailing lists of open-source software: Catalyst, MojoMojo, Markdown etc. The point of a mailing list *archive* is to store messages. This "feature" of Nabble deleting messages it thinks are obsolete, is simply unacceptable. Archives exist so that people can search for their questions. If nobody saw thread X in the past 6 months, so what? Someone may search for it tomorrow.

What is the reason behind deleting topics? Why destroy knowledge? Text storage is extremely cheap. I'll happily donate $200 for some extra hard drives in your RAID setup, that will store messages for 10 years, just to see this automatic deletion removed.

Automatic deletion puts Nabble in the same category as Wikipedia's deletion spree of open-source software articles, and makes it as bad as IMDB, which deletes discussion threads older than some number of months.

I've read the official justification, but honestly, it doesn't make any sense to delete "inactive" topics, as I've explained above.

Please, reconsider this practice.

[Franklin <Nabble>]

Graham, please tell us what you think we should do.  Here are our constraints:

1.  We cannot afford to keep all abandoned content because it slows down our database.  If you want to see the consequences of this, try surfing around http://old.nabble.com/ .  The database there is just too big, so performance is unacceptably slow.

2.  We have 2 programmers, so we do not want to spend time on complicated solutions.  Please keep it simple.

Graham Perrin wrote

At the very least, please make the warnings visible to the user WITHIN Nabble — do not require the user to STEP AWAY from Nabble to maintain it! (AFAIR that suggestion was made previously.)

It is visible WITHIN Nabble.  We show a message at the top of the forum that is scheduled for deletion.

[Franklin <Nabble>]

dandv, we are very careful not to delete content just because we think it's obsolete.  We notify the forum owner 2 weeks before deletion and show a warning at the top of the forum so that he can save the forum if he cares about it.  We only want to delete content that nobody cares about anymore.  And even when we do delete the forum, we don't delete immediately the threads in the forum.  In fact we only delete the top level forum or post on each round so that we can give everyone a chance to save their content.

And thanks for $200 offer but the problem isn't disk space.  The problem is database performance.

[dandv]

What if the forum admin is no longer watching their e-mail? What if they're on a sabbatical? What if someone else needs that information a month after Nabble has deleted it? "Nobody cares about anymore" is a temporary state. Deletion is a permanent solution.

How come that the huge forums listed at http://www.big-boards.com/ (Gaia online - 1.7 Billion posts) don't feel a need to delete topics?

If database performance is the problem, then deleting certainly isn't the solution. Knowledge accumulates at a faster rate than deletion - at least for a successful forum/mailing list archive solution. If database performance is the problem, then it needs to be addressed, not worked around by deletion. Deletion won't scale anyway.

I'm sure there are FOSS solutions lying around. Yahoo! has used petabyte PostgreSQL databases with good success. BDB is also very fast. I'm not saying migrating would be easy, or addressing scalability concerns is trivial. But it's the right thing to do.

[Franklin <Nabble>]

dandv wrote

What if the forum admin is no longer watching their e-mail? What if they're on a sabbatical? What if someone else needs that information a month after Nabble has deleted it? "Nobody cares about anymore" is a temporary state. Deletion is a permanent solution.

We will change the deletion warning on the forum to let anyone save it.  So all it will take is one user seeing the warning and responding to it to save the forum.

How come that the huge forums listed at http://www.big-boards.com/ (Gaia online - 1.7 Billion posts) don't feel a need to delete topics?

We can also handle huge forums.  We have a distributed architecture so we can distribute forums among servers.  What we can't afford is to keep large amounts of content that no one care about (which I call "junk").  The problem with junk is that it costs money to keep but has no potential for ever generating revenue.  A big active forum is fine because we can eventually either put up ads or ask to be paid.  But junk is just a drain for us.  The cost of junk is the added hardware needed to handle the junk, not the disk to store it.  We use Postgres and it's okay.  The scaling up issues for us aren't technical, they are financial.  We can keep adding servers as long as the content on the server can pay for the server and its maintenance (sysadmin work).

[Graham Perrin]

Sorry for being stroppy, I understand the constraints. I've noted (but never complained about) the performance in the other area.

Franklin Schmidt <Nabble> wrote

We show a message at the top of the forum that is scheduled for deletion.

Improvement: present (1) a generic message — at the top of the user's other views — that steers to (2) the forum that is scheduled for deletion.

(Don't make e-mail *alone* the critical first piece of the jigsaw.)

Checking mail

Personally: what with this, that and the other I currently have around 8,000 unread messages scattered across seven Inboxes (yeah, I know, not great practice) so I use filters for some easily identifiable critical stuff. OK so I could add a filter to treat messages from Nabble as critical but really, most are not so. I take a leisurely approach to most things.

Less personally: the other day a friend went into hospital for an op that has a twelve-day in-hospital recovery period. If you're giving fourteen days' notice before deletion of content, that's only one day either side of major events such as this.

What if wanted to holiday for three weeks? Etc..

[Graham Perrin]

Franklin Schmidt <Nabble> wrote

We will change the deletion warning on the forum to let anyone save it.  

Suggestions:

 * focus less on the content that the computer thinks is junk

 * focus more on the person who created the content.

Simply: offer the warning to the person, in the web interface to Nabble, in most views. It needn't be upsetting or disruptive. Maybe an exclamation mark in a yellow triangle, near the personal menu at top right.

Any reasonable person will have no objection to a friendly flag that something they wrote or created may be outdated.

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Thanks for the feedback, Graham. We just released two important changes:

1 - Anyone can save any forum or message from deletion. So users can help each other in saving good content.

2 - We show which nodes are scheduled for deletion in "My Posts in All Places" and "My Stars in All Places" pages.

Note that showing an alert icon on the upper right corner of the screen (as you suggested) would take days to implement and have it working on embedded forums (because this would have to be created with JavaScript and embedding has several restrictions in this regard). So for now we will show the warning only on the pages mentioned above (item #2). Please let me know if you have questions, comments or concerns.

[Graham Perrin]

Thanks for the improvements!

Hugo <Nabble> wrote

2 - We show which nodes are scheduled for deletion in "My Posts in All Places" and "My Stars in All Places" pages.

When I see something like this —



— can I be sure that there are no exclamation marks elsewhere in the hierarchy?

In other words: if something is scheduled for deletion in a grand-child, will the exclamation mark appear alongside the grandparent?

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Graham Perrin wrote

When I see something like this — ... — can I be sure that there are no exclamation marks elsewhere in the hierarchy?

In other words: if something is scheduled for deletion in a grand-child, will the exclamation mark appear alongside the grandparent?

Only root nodes are scheduled for deletion. In other words, only threads that have been removed or inactive root-level forums will be caught by the garbage collector process. There is no way for a node down the tree be scheduled for deletion before its ancestors (unless you move a node that is already scheduled for deletion under a sub-forum, for example).

[Graham Perrin]

Hugo <Nabble> wrote

Only root nodes are scheduled for deletion. In other words, only threads that have been removed or inactive root-level forums will be caught by the garbage collector process.

That's very useful information, reassuring :)

Maybe update <http://n2.nabble.com/help/Answer.jtp?id=53> with a screen shot, or visual of some sort, in due course … no rush.

[chrilisa1214]

^_^

[Graham Perrin]

Graham Perrin wrote

Since My Posts in All Places no longer exists, is there a single place to view all things that are scheduled for deletion?

[Hugo <Nabble>]

The "My Nabble Applications" page (accessible from your profile) now shows which apps are scheduled for deletion.

[Harvey]

Wow what a thread.

I'm going on the assumption that if I get one post every 1 days my forum will be safe.

Also - sound like the simple solution is to pay the ad removal fee - then nothing will ever be deleted. (?)

Ski forum like ours will definitely have threads that lie idle for months, and then come alive again in winter.

[Harvey]

Franklin Schmidt <Nabble> wrote

So what do you suggest we do to make money?

My website is currently based on two free services - Blogger and Nabble.  Most probably know that Blogger is actually Google.  

Google's position seems to be that hosting (and everything for that matter) are free, so they don't need to support it. Not that there isn't help. Google also hosts Blogger Help, which is a forum for posting questions and trying to get solutions to problems.  But it's contingent on "the kindness (and patience) of strangers."  Most of the help you get is from people who are very knowledgeable in HTML and the special skills Blogger requires.

I can't say I blame Google for this approach. While they offer each blogger the option of adding Adsense (content based advertising) that Google could make money from, it is an option.

Many times I've said to myself - IF I COULD PAY for Blogger phone support I would. Nothing worse than having major issues with your site, and not knowing where to start to fix it.

To my point... the support that Nabble provides is really excellent IMO and I would pay for it, if I had to.

In business, the only relationships that survive any length of time are those that are "win-win." Where both buyer and seller succeed.  I think it's unreasonable to expect Nabble to continue indefinitely, providing very responsive support, with no return.

Hats off to the Nabble gang.  I look forward to all the upcoming developments and innovations.  I wish us all success.