How To Automatically Close Inactive Topics

@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!