How To Automatically Close Inactive Topics

Is there a reason why you can't close topics started by admins? 

We post a lot of support content, that do not need to be displayed in the activity stream, so it would have been great if there was an option to close topics started by us …. 

Thanks for your feedback/question @Hiewwaiy! We chose not to automatically close topics started by admins since the kind of content an admin posts (e.g. articles/product updates) tend to have their own workflow, separate from the end-user content lifecycle.

Re: your second point -> would you prefer for this support content to simply not appear in the activity stream at all, even when it’s first published?

Hi @daniel.boon 

Would you prefer for this support content to simply not appear in the activity stream at all, even when it’s first published? 

Yes that is exactly what we want!     

@daniel.boon I’ve just applied this setting to our community. How long will it take for replying to inactive topics to be disabled?

And a follow-up idea on this one:

We decided that app. 1,5 years of inactivity is, for us, a good time to auto-close a topic. But, we would like to keep ideas open for a longer time, ‘cause some things just take longer   Have you been considering this?

Hey @Suvi Lehtovaara  - thanks for your question! This rule is not applied retroactively to existing topics - i.e. it only applies to topics created after you set up the rule.

That’s an interesting idea - not something we considered when building it, but I agree it makes sense for ideas in particular :)

Well, that’s disappointing @daniel.boon.For us as an older community it is a real problem that users comment on older topics. Is the best practise to mass-close older topics?

@Suvi Lehtovaara Sorry to hear that & thanks for the feedback - I can understand that if you’ve got a lot of topics that match the criteria it would be simpler to mass close them immediately.

I think whether you should mass-close older topics depends a little on the context of your community. It’s possible to use the moderation overview for the purpose of closing older topics in bulk.

I found this topic with a couple of ideas to consider when closing older topics.

Hi @daniel.boon or colleague,

I like this new feature, but is there a way to edit the message for these automatically closed topics? It would be great to be able to add something like ‘This topic has been automatically closed. due to the inactivity of this topic. Check our FAQ or open a new topic’, to prevent people from leaving our Community and not returning..

Thanks in advance! 

Hey @David T-Mobile thanks for your question!

Currently there’s no specific message for when a topic has been closed automatically vs by a moderator, so this isn’t possible.

I believe you could add this part (‘Check our FAQ or open a new topic’) to the generic phrase for any closed topic, however (e.g. This topic has been closed for comments. <a href="https://community.insided.com/topic/new">Create a new topic</a>).

Thanks for the response Daniel, much appreciated! 

That would be an option, but that would also mean that the same message would be displayed when we closed a topic for rude behavior or for spamming the same question over and over. If anything, we don't want those people to start new topics! 

Hopefully it's something you'd consider for the roadmap, because it would be a convenient option to use. Have a good one!

@daniel.boon  we are about to mass-close some really old topics. I tried to close topics in bulk but is it only possible to close them one page at a time? I mean we have over 400 pages of topics that are over 5 years old, so closing them manually would take quite a while.

 

I fear that there is no real workaround here except to do it page by page for now, as there is no “mark all topics (from all pages)”. The only small thing you could do is to increase the number of topics per page from 25 to 50. So at least this would cut your work in half. 

Thanks @bjoern_schulze, that’s the best we’ve come up with also. “Unfortunately” we are an old community with over 55K topics over the course of 15 years, so there’s a lot of work to be done 

What does closing a topic do?

Are those topics no longer in search results?

No longer in the activity feed?

Do they appear in the analytics? 

I’ve somehow missed the basics!

@daniel.boon  we are about to mass-close some really old topics. I tried to close topics in bulk but is it only possible to close them one page at a time? I mean we have over 400 pages of topics that are over 5 years old, so closing them manually would take quite a while.

 

Thanks for sharing your feedback @Suvi Lehtovaara - unfortunately there’s no easier or quicker way than this at the moment. I can appreciate it’s a mammoth task with so much content on the community!

Hey @Kgastaldo thanks for your questions! Short answer: closing a topic prevents end users from adding new replies. The topics still appear in search, the activity feed, and analytics.

This article below has more information (it says ‘disable replies for an article’, but this applies to every content type on inSided):

Hey Daniel - So it’s probably not a good idea to close topics that don’t have any replies, since they’ll still be in your analytics? Just thinking if we close them, then they’ll never be answered … 

@Kgastaldo if you’re looking to increase the number of topics that have a response, then closing a topic will indeed limit success here. At some point I’d guess there’s a beneficial trade off you can make (e.g. a year or more since the topic was last active), where it’s arguable whether the conversation or question that was originally posted is still relevant. Hope that helps!

This thread was helpful for me, thank you to everyone who has contributed. Our reason for implementing this feature was to close topics from the past 2 years in an intentional and automated way.

I thought there was a bug when I found a post that didn’t have any activity since October 12 yet hadn’t been closed (I set topics to close after 60 days of no new activity).

I wish this rule was applicable to all topics, including those created before the rule was implemented.

If it’s dependent on topic creation date, then it’s difficult to make a rule like this very practical. When we change our moderation strategies, we are trying to impact the entire community health, not just community health from this day forward.

If we wanted to change the number of days before a topic is closed in a month and then again in 6 months, then different posts will be closed at different times depending on their creation date. 

Thanks for sharing your feedback @LPortalupi  - this is indeed a constraint of the current feature.

In terms of closing topics created before the rule was implemented, the only solution I can suggest is using the new moderation overview last active filter (>x hours old) and the close topic bulk action. However, you are currently limited to closing 50 topics at a time, so this requires a decent amount of effort!

This article has been edited according to some adjustments made to the way this automation rule works now.

• If a topic has been closed by the automation rule, and it is reopened by a moderator, the topic will be closed again by the automation rule (this was previously not the case).
• This automation rule will close all topics regardless of when the rule was activated and of when the topics were created, as long as, of course, the topics belong the configured categories and are inactive for the set number of days (this was previously not the case)
  If you disable this automation rule and then reactivate it after some time, all topics will still be closed if they match the configured criteria (number of days + belong to category).