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Daniele Cmty
Helper ⭐️⭐️
November 14, 2022
Question

How to put an "old content" warning?

  • November 14, 2022
  • 21 replies
  • 282 views

Hi there,

in our B2B / Customer Success Community we organise a thorough Community Cleanup (led by @Lena H.) every spring.

Mostly the following

  • Move topics in the right categories
  • Add more public tags to topics
  • See if we missed any follow-up questions
  • For content older >6 months: Check if the content/answer is up-to-date, and add a follow-up if something changed

 

Especially the last point is very tedious and involves a lot of manual work. As our Community and its content grow, we’re not sure how to tackle this.

Either we keep on checking every single topic and make sure old content is up-to-date (what we’ve been doing)

Another option that we may consider in the future is to kind of “dismiss” old topics and/or add a label/disclaimer that it may be out of date, 
(when i say content i mean mostly User-generated Questions)
→ 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from liability, they don’t have to update the content anymore and the reader knows that the content could  be outdated.

 

 

21 replies

Daniele Cmty
Helper ⭐️⭐️
November 14, 2022

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.

DannyPancratz
VIP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
November 14, 2022

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). 

FYI: I am no longer active in this community
Blastoise186
Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
November 14, 2022

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.

Bug blasting absolutely everything... The Blastoise Way
Daniele Cmty
Helper ⭐️⭐️
November 14, 2022

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.)

 

 

 

Daniele Cmty
Helper ⭐️⭐️
November 14, 2022

For reference: 

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

 

 

DannyPancratz
VIP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
November 14, 2022

@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)

FYI: I am no longer active in this community
Blastoise186
Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
November 14, 2022

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? :)

Bug blasting absolutely everything... The Blastoise Way
Daniele Cmty
Helper ⭐️⭐️
November 17, 2022

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.

Alistair FIeld
Expert ⭐️
November 18, 2022

@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! 

 

The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few. 🖖
bas
Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
November 21, 2022

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.