I wanted to check in with you all about an experiment I am trying. Some of you likely have better community memory than I do, so please educate me!
I have set the Support category so that topics are automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. This seems appropriate given my recent experience in the category. By then topics have been resolved or the person asking has moved on. Others with similar questions can start new topics particular to their situation.
For the last several months I have been triaging older Support topics that have gone unresolved, using this filter in my sidebar. In many cases topics actually get resolved fairly quickly thanks to very attentive and helpful members who answer questions. Sometimes topics do need a nudge after a week or two in order to check in with the person asking for help to see if their issue has been resolved, and to ask clarifying questions that might help them along (What are the repro steps? Did you use official install instructions? Does it work in safe mode? Etc). When I do this I will usually add a topic timer to close automatically 30 days after the last reply. If the person or another member in the community doesn’t respond within 30 days then I think it’s perfectly fine to let the topic close automatically.
However there are also cases when it makes sense to move topics from Support to another category, and I have been doing that too. For instance:
→ Community = open ended community building questions
→ Dev = customization, creating new plugins, etc
→ Feature or UX = feature requests or user interface improvements/fixes
→ Bug = bug reports
By setting topics in Support to automatically close after a month vs doing it manually, I am saving myself some time because currently using the admin wrench to do that is a bit cumbersome. It’s several clicks away!
I’ll check back in in a month or so to decide if we want to keep this setting enabled or if another approach might work better.
Have you thought about how you find the topics that were posted in Support, because that’s preselected and then moved to another category by community members? I can move topics, but I can’t remove the timer. So someone else needs to remove the timer after I’ve moved a topic.
Thanks for raising that point. It might be sufficient for you to flag it for moderators to make the change, unless you think you’re going to be doing this all the time. How often do you move topics between categories now?
Or you can ask data explorer to find out how many topics were moved
example query
-- [params]
-- date :start_date
-- date :end_date
SELECT
pr.user_id,
(regexp_match(pr.modifications, 'category_id:\s*-\s*([0-9]+)\s*-\s*([0-9]+)'))[1]::int AS old_category_id,
(regexp_match(pr.modifications, 'category_id:\s*-\s*([0-9]+)\s*-\s*([0-9]+)'))[2]::int AS new_category_id,
COUNT(*) AS change_count
FROM post_revisions pr
WHERE pr.modifications LIKE '%category_id:%'
AND pr.modifications ~ 'category_id:\s*-\s*[0-9]+\s*-\s*[0-9]+'
AND pr.updated_at::date BETWEEN :start_date::date AND :end_date::date
GROUP BY pr.user_id, old_category_id, new_category_id
ORDER BY pr.user_id, change_count DESC
This mod provides a starting category picker, and lists individual topics moved out of that category by date:
-- TOPICS MOVED LIST
-- [params]
-- date :start_date
-- date :end_date
-- category_id :cat_id
SELECT
pr.user_id, pr.post_id, pr.updated_at,
(regexp_match(pr.modifications, 'category_id:\s*-\s*([0-9]+)\s*-\s*([0-9]+)'))[1]::int AS old_category_id,
(regexp_match(pr.modifications, 'category_id:\s*-\s*([0-9]+)\s*-\s*([0-9]+)'))[2]::int AS new_category_id
FROM post_revisions pr
WHERE (regexp_match(pr.modifications, 'category_id:\s*-\s*([0-9]+)\s*-\s*([0-9]+)'))[1]::int = :cat_id::int
AND pr.updated_at::date BETWEEN :start_date::date AND :end_date::date
ORDER BY pr.updated_at DESC
I’m not someone who’d “have better community memory” than you, but FWIW your approach sounds reasonable. I’m glad someone is reviewing unsolved topics – and if I’m reading you right, topics without any answering post will not be auto-closed without a bump (I have a couple of those hanging out there myself…)
@tobiaseigen I feel that topics are typically (and most commonly) moved in the 1-3 days since the topics are created. Perhaps the topic timer should be added from the 3rd day onwards to facilitate a but of buffer time while topics are moved? Though I doubt if that’s possible without a plugin.
