How to put an "old content" warning?

One brief Idea I had is to change the following phrases:

So if the content is over x Year or over 2 Years old, you could add an addendum like we did below in german 
“(Attention: old Content)”

 

But I’m not sure if this is visible enough, as it can be easy to overlook.

For Articles,  you could create some automations through Zapier or something else to push an update to the public label. 

For questions with answers, it’d be a bit more complicated, but… if you did an index of the reply ID for the answers, you could do an API call to edit the reply itself, appending a note about how old the answer is. That way, the note would appear embedded in the answer itself. 

(Note: my links are for the USA region API, but it’d likely work the same for the EU region, just with a different API URL). 

You know something @Daniele Cmty …

You’ve stumbled on an ingenious Idea there. Firstly, if you’re after the EU API Docs (which it looks like you will be for your community), you can find those here. This link takes you directly to the EU equivalent of the one @DannyPancratz posted.

This does actually feel to me like something that would be nice to have on-platform as well. Not necessarily to modify the contents of a post/reply, but certainly a banner at the top isn’t beyond the realm of possibilities.

woohoo It’s big brain time!! 🧠

Our use case here is mostly to Questions with Answers. Our KB is hosted with a different tool, so our Community Articles are not numerous, and mostly up-to-date.

Thank you @DannyPancratz for the great idea with the API call to edit the reply and @Blastoise186  for the validation, as well as the EU API resources.
I will pass it on to some colleagues with better tech skills.

I can envision a Disclaimer note at the very beginning of each topic.

Do you happen to know, by any chance, what kind of formatting options we have?
(i.e. italic, highlight, callout, etc.)

 

For reference: 

here are some other discussions that are remotely related to this topic.

@Daniele Cmty once you do the initial audit and update OR if you want to proactively set up the edit for answers going forward…

You can setup a much simpler Zap to do this. 

1. Catch Hook - catch the webhook for marked answer (I use this to then award 10 points as an extension of our gamification -- incentivizing marking answers beyond the email nudge)
2. Delay - 6 months or X time
3. POST webhook to authenticate your API calls
4. POST webhook to edit the reply
   1. The information you catch in #1 (topic ID, reply ID, content of answer to append, etc) would be easy to pull into the actions for this since it’s part of the same Zap

You could build this and then “set it and forget it” so that you’re now having to redo this effort every x months. 

However, one big lesson I’ve learned: you run into issues if you edit the Zap during that delay period. It cancels the remaining steps because they’ve changed. Maybe there’s a way to deal with that, but I’m not aware. In the future, if I need to edit Zaps with a delay, I’m going to duplicate the Zap and then deactivate the old one after all the delayed runs have finished. (Although that’s much easier for delays of a few hours/days, rather than 6 months)

If it’s via the API… I’m not sure you’ll have many options for formatting sadly. Fancy stuff like BBCode etc tends to play havoc with the API of most places. For that reason, I’d definitely recommend testing it out against your staging instance first. Don’t go risking the production instance with untested code!

This would actually be a really good Idea though for inSided to consider. Mind posting one? :)

Maybe someone from inSpired can convert this into an idea?
I guess the discussion is still valid - and a lot of different approaches on how it could be solved with a built-in feature.

@Alistair FIeld let me know - if you feel like this is OK for Ideation, you can convert.
If you’d rather keep the discussion separate, I’m happy to post a separate idea.

@Daniele Cmty 

I would say post a separate idea. This discussion is too valid to push over to that side.

Thanks @DannyPancratz and @Blastoise186 for brainstorming! 

I like the ideas, wanted to add a few bits of random information :)

• You can use HTML in the API call for formatting. I wouldn’t go extreme, but using something like <b>, <strong>, <i> or a <div> with a special class should work.
  No guarantees that this behaviour won’t change in the future though..
• If you do use a delayed Zap, please make sure that you fetch the most recent content. Otherwise you run the risk of undoing intermediate edits to the content.

HI @bas,

Thanks for getting back.

We will try to move forward with this.
Would custom CSS also be a valid option for what we are trying to achieve?

Otherwise I will have a look at how we can implement it with Webhooks. I have 0 experience in this field but will try to get some help internally :)

Interesting idea.. unfortunately CSS cannot target the content of html.

You could do this with a piece of javascript in TPS. Tricky to make it robust since you are doing string-matching, so good to consider failure modes. Performance would be something to keep in mind too.

Done!
The idea can be found here:
 

One brief Idea I had is to change the following phrases:

 

 

So if the content is over x Year or over 2 Years old, you could add an addendum like we did below in german 
“(Attention: old Content)”

 

 

 

But I’m not sure if this is visible enough, as it can be easy to overlook.

I think that is the simplest, least risky, but also most elegant solution in terms of results.
However, it’s not too visible.

I’m wondering if there is a way with custom CSS to make the years timestamp a bit bolder / highlighted / in a different color? (bonus: only if it’s older than 1 year, so only when the count is years.)

Can I change the looks of the years timestamp (which affects topics and comments) without having an influence on reply count and views?

Anybody is welcome to answer, but I’m tagging @bas just in case, as I know he’s one of the CSS experts. 

Not with CSS unfortunately. It can’t change depending on the content of the HTML (so it can’t see if it says “months” or “years”).

@bas thank you - 

Would I still be able to change the appearance of the timestamp only, by using CSS? (without taking into account the content of the HTML)

As in, to change the formatting of the date?
Yeah, that should be fairly easy, it has a class “qa-latest-post-time” so any CSS that targets it should work, e.g.

.qa-latest-post-time{ background: red };

Would result in the following ugly thing 😀

Hi @bas, thank you so much!

I agree the red highlight is a monstrosity. But a “yellow” highlight doesn’t look too bad 😇

 

old User-generated topics: add a label/disclaimer that it may be out of date, 
→ which would save a lot of work. If a user wants to ask that question again, they can ask a new topic or more simply just follow up in a comment to check if anything changed.

Any thoughts / clever solutions to this?

For example, the Guardian has this feature:
Basically, by putting this warning they can free themselves from liability, they don’t have to update the content anymore and the reader knows that the content could  be outdated.

 

 

Hi ​@Kenneth R

2.5 years later,
This question is becoming more & more relevant for us (as we have a lot more potentially outdated content in our forum, and also some old “evergreen” content) and we would like to check if there are any updates re: the feasibility of this.
Are there any workarounds we could use?
Any other product/Support Folks who could support us with this?

To sum up..​​​​​​​
End goal:

Find a scalable way to avoid confusing our community users when reading potentially outdated content.

How?

​​​​​​​When a topic is older than X months, display a custom message in order to make user extra aware of topic age and encourage them to use extra discretion or ask follow-up questions about a given question.

Hey ​@Daniele Cmty - One other way to do this that I can think of is to use the inSidedData Object to have a sidebar HTML widget that only displays when the topic creation date is e.g. more than 3 years old.

You could possibly inject that element into the page somewhere else, but that would be more hacky and complicated than just using a sidebar widget.