Content - Your best practices for pruning content

Love this conversation as I’m asking this to myself right now - our community is only 6 months old but I can see content management is going to be a big task. 

Great suggestions above, but I wonder about process. Going back in time and reviewing thousands of threads is too time consuming. Any ideas about how to streamline content management?

Cheers. 

Funny you mention this actually, as I was chatting with Tim about this earlier today.

Probably the single most important thing to consider, is making sure that the content which is in the main “live” areas remains correct and doesn’t get so badly outdated that it comes back to bite you later. The comments above definitely are great for helping you to plan ahead though. :)

In my personal opinion, there’s not much you can do to automate these processes outside of the bulk-actions that you can already do with inSided and other existing tools that can flag up outdated content. Automation can often help with many things, but unfortunately content management is something that is very difficult to automate reliably. You can definitely use automated methods to speed up manual tasks though, such as moving an entire category of content to the archive in one go.

But perhaps what might be worth considering, is the possibility of splitting up the workload across your team. It’s definitely very overwhelming to have just one team member tackle this kind of beast alone (and would take absolutely forever just to get current!), so perhaps break the load down to have one or more team members tackle each section that they’re assigned to and then divide things up as appropriate. If you work smarter rather than work harder, it won’t feel anywhere near as much of a challenge.

I’m afraid it really is something that will catch you eventually, but the secret is to avoid letting it get too overpowered without noticing.

Yeah I must say we are also struggling with this sometimes. I think most of what makes content outdated are changes in your own product. It can be challenging to find all pieces of content that mention items that have changed in the meantime. Good tagging (public or internal) can surely help with this, but it is not a guarantee that this will work for each situation that you find yourself in.

I can recommend doing a topic export if you are looking for topics which might are up for an update / archiving. By the hand of a topic title you at least get somewhat of an idea if e.g. a certain feature is covered in it. Of course you can drill down to certain categories or split topics amongst your colleagues to check and have them updated.

If that is not an option, I’d try to set a date limit for each category (e.g. the date a new release / major change has happened) and then archive all topics that are older than that. For a community that is just 6 months old I would not advise to do that (with an eye on the total content a younger community has), normally you look here at content that is at least a year old.