Archiving vs Closing & Bulk Topic Update

Hi there,

Over time our forum has become rather cluttered with old topics so we are undergoing a clean up task. I have a couple of quick questions (apologies if these have been answered elsewhere!)…

  1. What is the difference between Archived and Closed topics? I have seen elsewhere that an archived topic cannot be altered at all whereas a closed topic simply cannot be replied to. We were hoping that closed topics would still be visible within their category whereas archived topics would only be available to view if they are searched for. Is this possible? It seems at the moment that archived topics can still be viewed within their category?

  2. Is there a way to bulk-update a number of topics, perhaps where there hasn’t been an update in X amount of time? This clean-up is long overdue so manually archiving each individual topic will not be an insignificant task!

Thanks in advance.

Josh

No, that’s not possible.

In any topics list, you can click the “list” icon left to the “Topics” header to enable the bulk selection of topics. After selecting some topics, click the :wrench: on the right and select either “Close” or “Archive” topics.

Thanks for the swift reply!

So am I right in saying that a post will not be bumped when it is archived, but will remain in the Category itself forever (or until it’s deleted)?

And with regard to bulk updating topics, if we use the ‘auto close topic hours’ on a category, will that be actioned against all existing topics that haven’t been updated within that window or will that only work for subsequent posts/topics?

Thanks,
Josh

More info: Best practices for archiving topics - #4 by codinghorror

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We have a guide that explain the difference between archived, closed and unlisted topics.

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