I’m thinking about a policy where all topics are hidden / deleted permanently from the community after a week or so of inactivity.
The idea is to encourage people to share more openly without fear of their words sticking around to hurt them or be used against them in the future.
Has anyone done anything like this (with success)?
Not really “activity” in terms of “has anyone visited this topic”, but there is the topic timers feature that can auto-close / auto-delete topics based on a set datetime or by hours after the last post datetime.
At SitePoint we have most categories set to auto-close topics when a topic hasn’t gotten a reply for a few months. The topic can still be read, Likes can be given etc. so in a way they could still be considered as “active”. Activity in this context means “getting replies”.
We have not tried auto-deleting topics, but my assumption is it would work similar to auto-close. I do not know if deleting the topic would negate some statistics eg. Like counts, post counts, etc. so you should take that possibility into consideration.