Managing and Auditing Historic Posts

I get the concern. From my experience it is both often valid and often a strawman-boogeyman that can create unnecessary roadblocks and/or inefficient manual moderation processes. 

I don’t have it solved myself, but here’s what I rely on: 

• The Reporting feature exists - Train the internal team on this and set an expectation that if they see something outdate, they should flag it. This can be gamified/incentivized for superusers or every user if you wanted (gamifying a crowdsourced audit is in my backlog)
   
• Small community audits at the end of internal workflows. Build partnerships with teams and add community into the end of processes. 
  
  Did something change in your product? Or did you publish a new learning resource? Use the go live of those changes/updates to audit keywords and tags in the community. This gives you smaller, more manageable, and relevant audits. 
   
• Small daily auditing. 5-15 minutes a day goes a long way. 
  • Create a saved view of topics whose publish date and/or last activity is X months old
  • Create a saved view of topics X months old that have new activity. If people are asking following up questions or discussing further, a quick review helps avoid 
     
• Periodic auditing. This isn’t as easy as it should be in Gainsight, and it might be more effective with Google Analytics or automations that caputre the data and give you the views you need. (I’m not doing this yet, but it’s on my list)
  • Review the top X posts by views each month if they are older than X
  • Review any posts with new likes if they are older than X

And, in thinking about this, one solution you could leverage is closing the topic. If you aren’t already using this feature, you could

1. Automate closing the topic after X time
   • If you wanted, you could add an alert to the end of the automation that triggers the team to review it when it hits X time and is closed. That way you at least audit/update it at that point. 
2. Update the Phrase for the closed topic to be a warning about how old the post is. 
   “This post is more than 1 year old, so some of the information may be out of date.” 
   • I’d recommend also tying in a call to action (and possible gamification) for them to report the post if it seems out of date or needs updating. 

Hey Brian @bdrivas 👋🏼 - While our community isn’t as mature as @DannyPancratz’s, this is something I’ve had on my radar to think about - setting a process before it becomes unmanageable & a massive backlog project. (In fact, @DannyPancratz has a ton of great automation in play that I’m interested in!) We still need to reschedule that chat - maybe we can add this to our agenda to brainstorm together. 

Thanks @DannyPancratz and @cclements! Really great ideas, especially around automating as much of this as possible.

Courtney: Just messaged you on LI to get that chat rescheduled 😃

@bdrivas This is something we’ve dealt with pretty extensively in our community, as our products have changed and grown significantly over the years and it’s quite easy for posts to no longer be relevant or accurate regarding the current state of things. We used to pretty aggressively audit out and delete things, but found that we actually were negatively impacting our traffic and searchability by doing so. Additionally, as Danny mentioned, it takes a TON of time to stay on top of when doing manually and I’ve usually concluded that there are higher value projects than audits that I can pursue in our community. Now, we err on the side of leaving it live, even if it’s not perfectly accurate. We use a few approaches here:

1. Use recent activity to direct your attention. As older posts are revived with newer comments, take the opportunity to review the content of the entire post. Our moderation team is trained on reviewing any screenshots, instructions, links, etc. in each post they’re responsible for and flagging it for us as community managers if we need to take action. 
2. Prioritize your top-viewed posts. we’ve found that ~20% of our posts are responsible for ~80% of our traffic, especially via organic search. That ~20% is much more manageable to audit regularly than the full amount, and is also higher stakes for making sure it’s good, helpful, and accurate. 
3. Delete or archive sparingly and as a last resort. In most cases, I’ve found that a post is still worth keeping and can be edited or clarified to make it useful. But, if I deem a post unsalvageable, I like to set up a redirect to a similar resource to avoid any dead ends. 

I hope this helps!