Re: garbage identification, intervention by owner of content, export, deletion

Posted by Franklin <Nabble> on
URL: https://support.nabble.com/Why-are-Certain-Forums-and-Topics-suddenly-scheduled-for-deletion-tp4131246p4179176.html

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.