AutoBump Decay Over Time

[Remah (Just another happy Discourse user)]

I presume that you mean an auto un-bump if the topic receives no activity. But do you mean by no activity: no reads, no edits or no replies)?

I think that the answer is to do something about such topics! I was going to stop here but I thought it was worth explaining in more detail for anyone else who is interested. Also, if I’ve misunderstood the auto bump feature then others can clarify.

The forum admins/moderators should make a decision about such topics rather than creating an auto-bump decay feature to suppress them. Without a change in the topic status, these topics will keep rising from the grave again and again.

AFAIK, auto-bumped topics are selected from topics last updated in the past year with the following attributes. Completing any of the following actions will prevent the topic being bumped again and give it some activity:

• non-closed
  • Close
• non-solved
  • Solve
• non-archived
  • Archive
• non-pinned
  • Pin
• non-hidden e.g. in a closed category
  • Move to open category
• non-deleted
  • Delete
• non category description
  • no action required

This is consistent with the auto bump feature being an opportunity to promote forgotten topics so forum users have another can decide what to do with them. The main advantage of an auto bump is that it is noiseless cf. a manual bump that requires noise such as a pointless edit or reply in the topic.

Automatically bumping old topics on a category

On certain categories it makes sense to bump old topics automatically on a regular basis. On buying/selling categories in can make sense to regularly bump visibility while a topic is open and item is still on sale. In #support categories it may make sense to bump old topics in case they were forgotten Till now the only way to raise visibility was to “edit” the last post of a topic or post a bump reply. Both of these solutions are not ideal. We just added a new category setting called:…

If you don’t do anything with an auto-bumped topic then it might be auto bumped again but not if it was bumped in the previous 24 hours or if it is older than a year.

Auto bump is usually superfluous if you enable auto-close {x} days after the last reply. But both features can work together if the auto-close interval is large enough, e.g. one year, so that the oldest open posts can be auto bumped.

So if there silence on a topic then what does that tell you about it?

• Complete?
  In other words, It is good to read but doesn’t require any other interaction.
  i.e. the question was answered, the issue was resolved, the time has now passed, etc.
  • Close
• Incomplete? With no likelihood of ever being complete.
  e.g. if the original poster never replies to let us know
  • Close
  • Archive or
  • Delete if there’s no useful info
• Out of date or obsolete?
  e.g. pertaining to a deprecated feature
  • Archive or
  • Delete
• Not of interest to the community?
  i.e. nobody reads it
  • Delete
• Clearly irrelevant?
  i.e. about a different product, organization, forum or community
  • Delete
• Clearly of no value?
  e.g. spam
  • Delete

Finally, if you prefer to keep all posts open then maybe you don’t want auto bump, e.g.

@tophee

So I’d prefer to keep most of them open until it’s easy for people to reply to a closed topic.