Best practices for archiving topics

feature
22

I guess we have different definitions for what “archived” means.

To me it does not mean “ready for the trash heap” but “saved for posterity”.

That is, they should not be like unlisted topics, uhmm, isn’t that what unlisted is for?
They should be accessible via Search
They should be crawled by bots

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23

@mcwumbly you have peculiar ideas of what “the archives” means, at least in terms of how the real world analog works.

It is more like cold storage, out of the way, a bit harder to get to, but being completely inaccessible – absolutely never the intent.

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24

OK, I think I’m on the same page with both of you actually. There were some earlier conversations regarding topics here being deleted because they became obsolete or misleading as the world around them changed.

This still rubs me the wrong way, so I was reaching for a solution. I think “archive and unlist” would be a better way to handle that… which I noted above:

And now re-reading earlier posts I see it was already mentioned before too:

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25

This doesn’t seem to the case? On 1.3.0 stable (yea i know it’s old) , archiving a topic does not change it’s visibility in the “Latest” or “Category” view. It still appears, with a lock next to it.

26

We never intended archive to hide, if you need to hide stuff you can make your topic unlisted

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27

Fair enough, it works for me either way - was just trying to help @DeanMarkTaylor amend his notes.

@sam is this kinda correct:

  • Closing is stopping further comment, but still allowing edits?
  • Archived is closing, but also ‘freezing’ so that the topic cannot be amended at all.
28

Cheers @twbartlett

I am unable to edit my post above - probably because significant time has past since it’s initial posting.

I can confirm that the following is false (at least for admin in my test setup):

But the following is important to remember when marking a topic as Archived:

So it will not suddenly appear in “latest” because you archive it. If this does happen it’s likely something else you have done to the topic that has caused this.

And the following above statement is kinda pointless because of the above clarification:

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29

I’ve now made my original post a “wiki post” (because that’s a feature now) and made the correction.

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30

@riking did this via:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/2f0bd6294c2866889f5d7f741d19009efa64f7ff

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31

Just putting this here because it seems relevant and “cool” …

Sometimes it’s nice to pull something out of cold storage…

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32

Note my original post has been updated and reposted in the #faq:

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