Provide access to own topics and posts for Archived / Hidden topics

Thank you again for sharing this idea! We have made the decision to park it for now because it didn’t gather enough votes.

Can we revisit this? The community platform somewhat recently migrated, and I was a part of a number of groups. Some groups I no longer have access to, some I just don’t know to rejoin, etc.

The problem is that I have a number of posts and comments that I can no longer see. These posts are still relevant, and users that have access to the group and/or post should still be able to see and interact with it. Additionally, I may want to even refer them to community managers or other product managers as reference, and I can no longer do so.

Short ask: If I created a post or made a comment, I should have access to those posts and comments in my history.

100% -- I had to request access to the old beta groups I was a member of, and when I had a post (question) I’d made earlier in that private group that was absolutely relevant to a new idea I submitted in the publicly visible side of the community, 99% of the community members (and Gainsight employees) were unable to see it.

I shouldn’t have to literally copy the post into a Google doc and drop it in a new post as a comment for it to become visible.

Hi @dayn.johnson and @bradley - the challenges that you’re describing aren’t related to any archiving that we’ve done or any content that we’ve hidden (so we might move these questions out of this particular idea), but I think we do understand what you’re running into.  

As part of the migration we did in December we unfortunately weren’t able to migrate Group membership, so we’ve been doing our best in our announcements and emails to communicate that everyone needs to re-join their old Groups.  For most Groups, new invites were sent out.  And any public Groups can simply be re-joined.  If there are any other Groups that you’re still missing you can always reach out to us (community@gainsight.com) and ask us for help.  Almost all Groups were migrated over, with the exception of a couple that were no longer running actively (e.g. a couple of Beta groups).

The other thing you might be running into is that we weren’t able to migrate the ‘activity feed’ from profile pages.  We realise that some folks use this feed to find content they created in the recent past, so it was unfortunate that this feed needed to be reset.  However, as a workaround, from your profile page you can still click on ‘topics’ or ‘replies’, and these links will take you to your full list of created content.

Hope this helps - don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any more questions or issues.

Makes sense, thank you @Kenneth R!

I actually screenshotted my groups page and rejoined all the groups I was in prior to the migration, so I have access there, and I do check the “topics” and “replies” in my profile to find my old posts as I might need them.

Thanks for the reply @Kenneth R - you are correct it’s not exactly the same root cause (I was being a bit lazy in not making a new post, but at the same time wary of essentially duplicating ideas) but from a user perspective it’s still the same issue: I created a post/comment that I no longer have access to (even though the post itself was not deleted).

As you said, not all of the groups were migrated over. That doesn’t mean the posts themselves are not still valid. Many ideas I have posted are years old and still use cases that need addressing. Does that make sense?

@bradley Yes absolutely, makes total sense.  There were a couple of groups that weren’t migrated over, as we’ve talked about, but more broadly I think you are indeed making a really interesting point that does align with the original idea for this topic. 

We generally don’t ‘get rid of’ content here, for the reasons you and the original idea above describe.  In this community we haven’t, until now, actually done any serious archiving for a long time.  Now what’s interesting is that since this idea was created, a change was made in the CC platform to allow for archiving in a way where the archived content remains available to those who created the content.  In short, we have the ability to create a publicly accessible ‘archive category’ where the content is removed from community and search engine indexes, but is still available to those with a direct link. 

So this idea can actually be marked as released, and I can say that as we move forwards, any archiving we do (and we do plan to start doing that in the near future!) will be done in this way so that you don’t lose access to old content.  We’ll aim to do the same with any groups that close, but there may be exceptions with, for example, Beta groups, if there’s content our Product folks don’t want to become public. 

@Kenneth R good to know. And just to clarify, does that mean those “archived” posts will still be available in that users own history? As in, I can go to my own profile and see posts I’ve created?

What about posts I’ve commented on that are archived? Would my comments show up in my own history and I would be able to access the posts that way?

If they’re not indexed or show up anywhere else, users would have to save the URL of everything they’ve created or commented on which wouldn’t make sense.

Also, and I realize this post was initially about archival only, and your last comment is refocusing back on that, but what about posts or comments to groups that one no longer has access to or no longer exist? Those likely don’t meet your definition of “archived”, but in the spirit of “I created it or commented on it I should retain access to it” will we get access to those as well? I appreciate that from a back-end perspective those are different things, but from a user standpoint the distinction is irrelevant.

Hey @bradley - so for the archiving exercise, you would still see those (both topics and replies you’ve made) in your history and easily be able to find your way back to them that way.  And keep in mind that when we do archive, we’ll do it for a reason - it will be old content that hasn’t been engaged with for a long time and that likely is no longer accurate (this community has been around for almost ten years!).  

When we do close a group we’ll aim to keep the content available by moving it out to a category, so that you still have access to it.  As I mentioned above, there might be exceptions to this, for example, if the content is confidential (for example, related to a private Beta).

I’m not sure I understand how this applies to all the posts that were made in a beta group. For example, there were a LOT of posts about features/issues that are now live in the new dynamic JO that were spun up in the beta group. Those posts are still very relevant, since a lot of those features or issues are still being discussed now that dynamic JO is out of the private beta.

It should not fall to us as USERS of Gainsight to pull the content from one of those private posts into a comment in a new, publicly viewable post. See this example post -- and the comment (8th one down) that includes all of the content from the private post (sourced by copying the previous post into a Google Doc, reformatting, and removing the extraneous text and icons). It’s inconvenient to be trying to discuss one of these issues (especially when there are supporting screenshots) with other community members and to not be able to share the posts with them so they have all the info.

If the posts we make in a private beta group will not be publicly visible once the new feature goes live, there needs to be a better way for all users to have access to information about the features that may be helpful to them.

I guess I’m still not tracking this part either, and I agree with @dayn.johnson too. Even if we can’t share it with anyone who wasn’t in the Beta group to begin with unless we repost the content somewhere else, I don’t understand why I would not still have access to posts and content that I have created. 

In my experience, at least half of the feedback given during a Beta isn’t addressed by the time the beta closes and it may be years before it ever is. If I’m having conversations with product and engineering, I should still be able to reference my old posts even just as talking points, and they will likely have specific examples as well.

Hey @bradley and @dayn.johnson - I’m hearing your concerns and needs loud and clear.  The fact is that we don’t have a highly formalised process for the closure of groups yet (they are mostly run by folks in other teams across Gainsight, with our support).  We’ve discussed as a team and we’re taking your input here onboard as we look to guiding group creation (and eventual closure) moving forwards - totally get why you want and expect to maintain access to your posted content. 

Thanks @Kenneth R for indulging us and looking into it Might be helpful to other users if the status of this request was changed as well so it doesn’t look like it’s been solved and not being looked into further.

Agreed with @bradley, thank you!

Yep!  I’ll ping our CC Product team to get this one changed - like I said, we actually did deliver on this idea within the CC Product a couple years ago.  :)

Awesome, that would be great! Since there’s still the issue with hidden things not being accessible it would probably help internal teams as well as customers to see that it’s still an open item worth voting for/commenting on.